Academic Records Validator Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Fraud in academic certificates has become a significant issue in employment, admissions to institutions, and institutional certification. The traditional methods of manual checks are tedious, inefficient and subject to fraud. To provide credible certificate validation, the present study suggests a secure and automatic Academic Records Validator, which can be viewed as a hybrid of blockchain technology, optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI)-based forgery detector. The system retrieves structured information from 10th, intermediate, and degree certificates using OCR, including the candidate's name, roll number, certificate number, the name of the educational institution, year of graduation, and course information. The retrieved data should be standardised and converted to a single format to obtain a SHA-256 cryptographic hash. To ensure data privacy and guarantee immutability, integrity, and tamper-resistance, the hash value is stored only in the blockchain. To determine legitimacy, the uploaded certificate is OCR'd, compared against blockchains and recreated hashes, and the similarity is assessed by AI using cosine similarity algorithms. Experimental evaluation shows high forgery-detection capacity and secure verification with minimal processing time. The proposed system provides a secure, privacy-preserving, and tamper-resistant method for academic certificate verification in real-world scenarios.