CBSE, the Central Board Of Secondary Education, has come up with a new solution - Academic (BlockChain) Documents, dubbed ABCD, to keep academic documents and other important documents secure and tamper-free.
The board has collaborated with the Centre of Excellence for Blockchain Technology of National Informatics Centre(NIC) to create the ‘Academic {BlockChain} Documents’ software to allow online access to documents in a verifiable manner.
CBSE said that academic documents of CBSE are now recorded by linking them like a chain using blockchain technology. This chain records the documents in a distributed manner in multiple locations. Documents in this chain are secured, tamper-proof and immutable as an attempt to tamper with the data is not possible because all distributed locations need to be updated as per the agreement to synchronize the data between them.
Source: CBSE
The academic document can be used by educational institutes for verification at the time of admission, and companies for job offers. Users such as students, educational institutions, companies can access the documents through the official websites i.e cbse.certchain.nic.in or cbse.gov.in.
Users can verify the academic documents by accessing the portal and submitting the basic details of the student for example roll number etc. for viewing the academic documents.
The other option meant for bulk verification is that the institutes or companies can register with the CBSE and use the bulk verification tool and API-based verification modes.
As of now, CBSE’s academic documents of the academic years 2019, 2020 & 2021 for class X and XII are in the Blockchain and soon the board would append academic documents for the previous years as well.
Well, in Blockchain Technology the data is recorded in the distributed ledger with all the participating nodes. The data can only be recorded based on the consensus among the nodes and simultaneously at all the locations in the distributed network of Blockchain nodes. This eliminates the dependency on the third party for verification. Also, the data is linked and stored with cryptographic security to make it immutable and traceable. The linking of the blocks in the Blockchain ensures the security of data from any attempt to temper. The data are trustable as they can be verified across the participating nodes.
CBSE noted on its official website that the financial institutions can also use this system for sanctioning of loans based on the qualification of the applicants. ABCD is transparent, tamper-proof, and paperless, and also without any dependency on a third party.