Personal Data Protection of Educational Records for Students in Postgraduate Studies with Blockchain Scheme

Abstract

Recently most educational record has been digitized in various educational institutions. Educational institutions store a significant amount of sensitive data ranging from student personal information to research and tests documents which this information is official and confidential documents. Many postgraduate students are working in economic sectors, military and government, those students can be a target for cyber-attacks. Since there is a noticeable weakness in cybersecurity within higher education, precisely protecting the privacy of student’s data, the intensity and complexity of attacks on educational records have increased. However, various educational institutions rely on third party to provide storage and sharing services, which means that there are threats to security, privacy, and trust. In term of privacy-preserving storage, centralized storage prone to privacy leaks, censor and disclose data. Moreover, data sharing approaches are still immature within the context of trust. To minimize the risk of this problem, we proposed a decentralized blockchain scheme ensure the privacy, reliability of data storage, secure sharing of student’s personal information that in educational record. The decentralize nature is achieved by leveraging the advantage of interplanetary file system (IPFS) which it utilizes the “offchain” data storage. Moreover, we utilized double encryption and decryption technique that combined between RSA-256 and DES (Data Encryption Standard). To handle sharing process of educational records, smart contracts are presented, the records of the sharing process.