BLOCKCHAIN BASED SECURITY FRAMEWORK FOR ACADEMIC RECORDS MANAGEMENT

Academic records must be protected from unauthorized modification while allowing verification of their contents. This paper presents a prototype system that utilizes institutional approval, secure storage, access control, and a permissioned blockchain to meet these needs. The prototype stores complete records in an encrypted institutional repository and stores their hashes, issuers, timestamps, versions, and statuses on a three-node permissioned blockchain. It was evaluated using 1,200 original records, 200 approved corrections, 100 revocations, and 300 crafted security cases. On average, revocations were registered in 319 ms, and transcripts in 538 ms. A check of a valid active record took 186 ms. The system registered 81.6 transactions per second with 40 concurrent clients. All 300 crafted misuse test cases were denied in the lab test, and all 4,860 restricted actions generated audit rows with the expected fields. On-chain metadata averaged 0.21 KB per version compared to 38.6 KB for an encrypted transcript stored elsewhere. The prototype demonstrated the ability to detect record alterations, enforce issuance policies, and retain correction and revocation records in a laboratory environment. The prototype’s value depends on the accuracy of institutional records and the security of institutional issuance keys.