MIT blockchain paper: Research on blockchain certificate framework and privacy solutions

MIT Media Lab published a new report on its blog titled "What Have We Learned from Designing a Degree Credentialing System on the Blockchain?" The document studies the properties of digital certificates based on distributed ledger technology. Over the past year, the research team has conducted a project to verify digital certificates using blockchain technology and Mozilla Open Badges.

MIT researcher: Bitcoin blockchain is currently the "most tested and trusted blockchain"

The MIT research team has released code to this open source project, which aims to make it easier for people to create similar applications. The reason for designing this project is because of the importance of immutable digital certificates. Now the document on the MIT blog details a previous blog post written by J. Philipp Schmidt, which proposed that this certificate concept may replicate the past era of "carpenters carrying reference books with them." In the document released this time, the authors said that they have benefited greatly from blockchain technology. The document stated that the research team has realized that there is a lot of attention on distributed ledger technology now, but this technology is not simple. Juliana Nazaré, J. Philipp Schmidt and Kim Hamilton Duffy jointly explained in the blog:

“One of the most important things we’ve learned is that blockchain is much more complex than most people understand. Building applications on blockchains — as we do — is becoming easier, but there are still very few people who deeply understand the inner workings of the technology (and we don’t think that includes us). Blockchain is not the simple solution that many people mistakenly believe it is. However, the technology does offer some possibilities to improve the current system, and we are very happy to explore that.”

For source code and discussion of the project, click here. The certificate architecture in the MIT team's project is 'quite simple'. The digital certificate framework includes: Cert-schema , Cert-issuer and Cert-viewer , which jointly broadcast data to the Bitcoin blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain is also mentioned in the published document. They said that when they started their research, Ethereum was still in its infancy, and the Bitcoin blockchain is currently "the most tested and trusted blockchain".

MIT researchers also used private/public key cryptography to authenticate the issuer and recipient of digital certificates. This digital certificate application also has a revocation function to eliminate the certificate, but it is not a true deletion because the original information of the blockchain can never be deleted. The blog points out that the Bitcoin distributed ledger is open and unchangeable, but the author is aware of people's concerns about privacy. The document report states:

“Some of our colleagues at MIT are working on systems that offer more sophisticated ways to manage private data, but they are still in the early stages of development. However, in our solution, we try to balance obfuscation with usability, so that institutions or academics who don’t have advanced technology can use the certificates. We do this by converting the certificate into a hash and putting it on the blockchain. If someone wants to verify the certificate, the owner of the certificate needs to show both the certificate itself and the location of the certificate hash on the blockchain.”

Curation is an important approach for those who want to pick and choose which certificates they want to publish. The MIT research team said that the curation approach allows administrators to decide how much information to share. For example, educators may want to review students' academic records by using the MIT blockchain to verify certificates. Teachers can try and search for students' employment certificates, but "the contents of these certificates will be encrypted." Although the researchers said there are still many "flaws" at present, they are trying to make traceability more difficult in future implementations.

The project is currently available for testing applications. The project's creators said that if anyone is experimenting with this type of technology, they should join their GitHub repository. Overall, the MIT researchers seem very satisfied with the work they have completed and are looking forward to further development of the project. MIT has a lot of influence in digital currency and blockchain solutions, and also has its own digital currency project.