Abstract:
All academic activities produce records such as statements of result, testimonials, certificates and transcripts, most of which are stored in manual file cabinets and relational databases. With the growing importance of academic records in Nigeria, it has become imperative to protect them from falsification and accidental modification. Though the use of relational databases has been the de facto standard for storing academic records in recent years, the digitized contents are always under the control of a single administrator who has authoritative access with full rights and privileges to them. However, authoritative access is likely to introduce instances of unauthorized alteration of records due to centralized control of the database. With blockchain technology, the storage, modification, distribution and verification of academic records will be based on distributed consensus. This will allow all authorizing parties to be notified of changes and can either confirm or reject the status of any update on an earlier stored academic record using its hash. This paper presents a conceptual framework based on blockchain technology for the security of digitized academic records with digital signature scheme and timestamps. It is envisaged that the proposed approach will be valuable to tertiary institutions in Nigeria for the security of academic records in terms of modification and verification processes.
Keywords: data security, blockchain technology, academic records, cryptographic hash function
