Scholarium: Supporting Identity Claims Through a Permissioned Blockchain

The media has brought to the attention of the general public the issue of subjects claiming titles (e.g. academic degrees) which they have not achieved. Verifying these identity claims can be a cumbersome task. In this paper we show how identity claims can be supported through a permissioned blockchain. Although our approach can be applied to multiple contexts, we focus on the scenario where educational institutions provide graduation titles to subjects. The subjects can then demonstrate the possession of the given titles through transactions in the blockchain. We validate the feasibility of our approach through an implementation, named Scholarium, based on MultiChain, and provide a security analysis of the proposed system.