International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Aditya Dhakarge, Ramsha Siddiqui, Priyatam More, Ms. Chetana Bhagat, Dr. Madhuri Kawarkhe
Abstract: Verification of academic degrees still relies on institutional records, manual checks, and inspection of documents, resulting in delays and leaving room for openings when a certificate is digitally altered. This paper introduces SOET VeriTrust, a blockchain-based system for verifying academic credentials, which combines deterministic cryptographic validation and automated visual forensics. The implemented system uses Ethereum Sepolia smart contracts, Keccak-256 Merkle-tree commitments, a packed revocation bitmap, an off-chain SQLite database, and a Python FastAPI forensic microservice.Student records are encoded as canonical cryptographic leaves, while only the Merkle root is anchored on-chain, thus preventing direct storage of student personally identifiable information. During verification, the application performs the database lookup, issuer authorization, Merkle proof validation,revocation check, and optional Error Level Analysis (ELA) with a PyTorch convolutional neural network for visual tampering. An eight-state diagnostic engine separates the successful verification from the claim mismatch, invalid proof, revocation, missing records, issuer failure, and visual forgery. Experimental evaluation with five test documents and repeated verification requests revealed fast deterministic verification, with full forensic analysis adding extra processing time. The reported batch anchoring and packed revocation results also reflect the practical reduction in persistent storage on the blockchain as compared to registering credentials individually. The findings suggest that the combination of cryptographic integrity and visual forensic analysis provide a more informative verification process than simply matching document hashes.
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