CertiChain

Share your certificates securely on a blockchain

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Before we tell you about our project, let us tell you a quick story. While entering the venue of the Hackathon, we were asked to show our college ids. We graciously showed them but a quick thought popped up in our minds. They can see my name with the picture but what authenticity does the card holder to prove my identity was the thought that crossed us.

On that page, we started looking bigger, and we started looking at many areas like patient records, employment history and in fact every such area where security, availability, and authenticity is important. Through this project, we would like to focus on the degree certificates.

We all value our degree certificates so much that we all want to keep it safe. Everybody wants to keep the certificates in the strongest vault ever built but at the same time, want their certificates to be available, tamper-proof, show the value of their degree to people but in a limited fashion, and finally, be able to prove the authenticity of it.

In this project, we are happy to show you all that we built a black box, the world's safest vault ever built by humans where you can save the certificates in a secured and tamper-proof medium, at the same time be readily available to you in a few clicks along with giving you the complete control on it as to when you want to share it, with whom specifically and for how long you want it to be visible.

With all of these, we offer a unique proposition where you can’t mimic any other person in the system. So some random person cant pretend himself to be Stony Brook and thereby preserving the maximum authenticity your certificate can ever have. So finally, you dont need a physical copy of your certificate anymore, its all in your hands forever, and at the same time, its equally valuable and in the safest place you can ever imagine.

Let’s get into the specifics that we boasted on;

Firstly, the security. We are confident enough that this is the most secured platform ever for the following reasons: We store the contents of the certificate in IPFS, called as an Interplanetary File Storage. It is a decentralized storage mechanism that gives us the ability to store information on Block Chain. By Blockchain, we mean the data is encrypted and stored in many small nodes and whenever we wish to access it, we can only do so by using our personal private key. And as a second level of decentralization, we create a token with the address of the certificate and embed in a blockchain transaction that stays on the network forever and it can never be tampered with. So you dont have to worry about losing your certificate or get it tampered anymore.

Secondly, we offer the flexibility to the user to share the certificate. This is a very important and useful case in terms of patient data. We all want our health information to be private and have complete control over it in terms of deciding when to share and with whom to share and therefore, having this ability would make the application a lot more useful. And finally, people on the network cant pretend to be somebody else and therefore, it is assured that your certificates have the complete authenticity to it. And if somebody wants to check whether the certificate has been issued by the right medium, its just a click away and the best thing about blockchain is that its always honest. It never LIES!!!

While working on this for the past 2 days we ran into numerous issues, especially while working on nodejs and while integrating with an angular based front end application. We pulled through to submit a fledgeling application with all the components we deem are enough for a proof of concept.

We are especially proud of the fact that, we took a leap in terms of straying away from familiar concepts and domains and worked on (while learning) new things. We worked for the first time on a blockchain based application, integrating it with a cloud db, decentralizing on multiple levels, etc.

In the future, we would like to expand on our initial ideas to make the application more robust and easier to use. We would be happy to take more questions and discuss more about our project indepth and infact show you how it works.

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