In addition to tanking the
economy and society, credential fraud frequently damages the credibility
of higher education. As the majority of conventional verification and
issuance procedures are arduous, expensive, and obsolete, fraud has
proliferated in numerous forms, ranging from paper-based counterfeit
certificates to replicas enabled by database manipulation, and has
reached exponential quantities. In this paper, the authors propose
AlgoCert, a comprehensive credential verification solution that
incorporates blockchain, self-sovereign identity (SSI), and
decentralized identifier (DID) to introduce a more proficient,
attack-resistant system that is user-friendly as well as effective at
reducing widespread credential fraud. In addition, AlgoCert leverages
stateful smart contracts on the Algorand blockchain and non-transferable
non-fungible tokens (NFT), and neither students nor organizations are
required to handle credentials in order to use the system. This paper
provides a prototype of our solution and detail our attempts to develop a
verification service with features, including data security, transcript
authentication, and selective data disclosure.