SPROOF: A Platform for Issuing and Verifying Documents in a Public Blockchain

Clemens Brunner, Fabian Knirsch, Dominik Engel

2019

Abstract

Managing educational certificates or records of personal achievements often comes at the cost of handling documents, loss of data or malicious counterfeits. Especially in the case of printed certificates, both the origin and the integrity of certificates are hard to verify. Furthermore, such documents can be lost or destroyed due to unseen circumstances. Reissuing certificates can then be cost intensive, hard or impossible, e.g., if the issuing organization has been closed. While issuing and signing documents digitally solves some of these issues, this still requires centralized trusted infrastructures and still does not allow for easy verification or recovery of lost documents. In this paper, we present SPROOF, a platform for issuing, managing and verifying digital documents in a public blockchain. In the proposed approach, all data needed for verification of documents and issuers is stored decentralized, transparent, and integrity protected. The platform is permissionless and thus no access restrictions apply. Rather, following principles of the Web of Trust, issuers can confirm each other in a decentralized way. Additionally, scalability and privacy issues are taken into consideration.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Brunner C., Knirsch F. and Engel D. (2019). SPROOF: A Platform for Issuing and Verifying Documents in a Public Blockchain.In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-359-9, pages 15-25. DOI: 10.5220/0007245600150025

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp19,
author={Clemens Brunner and Fabian Knirsch and Dominik Engel},
title={SPROOF: A Platform for Issuing and Verifying Documents in a Public Blockchain},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2019},
pages={15-25},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007245600150025},
isbn={978-989-758-359-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - SPROOF: A Platform for Issuing and Verifying Documents in a Public Blockchain
SN - 978-989-758-359-9
AU - Brunner C.
AU - Knirsch F.
AU - Engel D.
PY - 2019
SP - 15
EP - 25
DO - 10.5220/0007245600150025