Abstract

Pulchowk Engineering Campus, DOECE, IOE

The increasing prevalence of digital certificate forgery poses significant challenges to aca demic institutions and professional organizations. To address these challenges, this project presents an IPFS-based Certificate Verification System, leveraging the InterPlane tary File System (IPFS) for decentralized storage and cryptographic hashing techniques for integrity verification. Unlike traditional centralized systems, our approach ensures tamper proof, immutable, and easily verifiable certificates, reducing the risks of fraud and unauthorized modifications.

The system operates by storing certificates in a decentralized IPFS network, where each certificate is assigned a unique Content Identifier (CID). Verification is achieved by compar ing cryptographic hashes stored in a secure PostgreSQL database, allowing fast and reliable authentication. A role-based access control model is implemented, ensuring that only authorized entities can upload, retrieve, and verify certificates while preserving privacy and security

The system has been fully developed and tested, including the successful implemen tation of decentralized storage, metadata management, cryptographic verification mechanisms, and a user-friendly web interface. Comprehensive testing under various scenarios has demonstrated high efficiency, strong security guarantees, and minimal computational overhead. The system is now fully functional and deployment-ready.

This project provides a robust, secure, and scalable solution for digital certificate authentication, significantly improving the trust and reliability of credential verifica tion processes across academic and professional domains.

Keywords: Digital Certificates, IPFS, Cryptographic Hashing, Decentralized Storage, Certificate Verification, Blockchain Security