Uma abordagem baseada em blockchain para armazenamento e controle de acesso aos dados de certificados de alunos do ensino superior

Abstract

Blockchain is considered an emerging technology, having aroused the interest of researchers and industries on the world stage. After the success of this technology in the financial market with virtual currencies (such as Bitcoin and Litecoin), blockchain starts to be used by different domains, such as government and education, as it provides a reliable, scalable and immutable distributed environment for the realization and storage of transactions on a network. Smart contracts are one of the features of the Ethereum blockchain, which has the ability to run a programming model for applications distributed in untrusted environments. These contracts reside on the blockchain and enable process automation in several stages. Smart contracts have become one of the most sought-after technologies due to the high customization they add to transactions, allowing to seek blockchain-based solutions to problems in industry and academia. Higher education is a system with several challenges that can be solved with the adoption of this technology. Protecting data transactions involving student degrees is one of the challenges considered by educational institutions. Thus, this work presents an architecture proposal based on blockchain technology to store and consult data from diplomas issued by higher education institutions. Through this architecture, a new approach for the validation of diploma data with this emerging technology was evaluated. As a proof of concept, a prototype of the environment was implemented using smart contracts based on the Ethereum platform. After implementation, an evaluation was carried out with specialists in the management of diplomas and an analysis of the performance of the transactions carried out in the prototype was carried out. In view of the results obtained, the proposal proved to be adequate to the process of storing and consulting diploma data.