From Concept to Practice: A Blockchain‐Based Solution for Secure and Efficient Academic Credentials in Higher Education

ABSTRACT The generation and verification of academic credentials, particularly diplomas, is crucial for the secure functioning, enhanced legitimacy and confidentiality of higher education institutions (HEIs). Digitising the internal services of HEIs is of great importance, as it mitigates the potential abuse of diplomas and other important documents. The prevalence of forgery attempts highlights the need for robust verification methods. In this regard, blockchain technology can be considered as a solution due to its capability to ensure the immutability, decentralisation, security and transparency of all documents stored on the blockchain network or storage. In this paper, we aim to move from concept to practical implementation of a blockchain‐based framework for generating and verifying diplomas, named Diploma Integrity Authentication Record (DIAR), which, in addition to the digitalisation of diplomas and academic documents, also enables their fast, secure, and cost‐effective verification. Through the paper, we describe in detail the process of practical implementation of the DIAR framework, presenting the smart contract for generating and verifying diplomas, the process of encrypting and storing diplomas as non‐fungible tokens on the blockchain network or storage. At the same time, the challenges of practical implementation are also described, which are predominantly related to the scarcity of blockchain solutions for generating and verifying diplomas in HEIs. Significant attention and emphasis are placed on the legal matters pertaining to the implementation and safeguarding of students' identification and data privacy.