ENSURING DATA INTEGRITY OF EXAMINATION RESULTS USING PERMISSIONED DISTRIBUTED LEDGER TECHNOLOGY

The increasing use of centralised Student Information Systems (SIS) as part of the digitalisation of higher education has led to these systems being used despite the risk of unauthorised alteration of student data due to reliance of data entry and administration on one administrative trust domain. This paper presents the design and experimental validation of a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) architecture to provide verifiable integrity of examination results. The proposed architecture is based on a combination of an SQL-based SIS and a Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain via a secure middleware layer. Examination records in the SIS are converted to a cryptographic hash commitment and stored on an immutable ledger. Experimental validation was carried out by deploying a Hyperledger Fabric Network in a containerized environment and testing it using Hyperledger Caliper at workload levels up to 120,000 transactions. Key performance metrics were throughput, commit latency, ability to detect violations of data integrity and storage characteristics of the ledger. The proposed architecture achieved throughput of 728 transactions/second and maximum throughput of 842 transactions/second with average commit latency less than 2.0 seconds. Tampering tests were performed to verify the architecture’s ability to detect unauthorised changes and it successfully detected all unauthorised changes with average detection time of 19.8ms. Analysis of storage requirements showed that the ledger grew linearly and would require less than 5.68 GB over ten years. The results demonstrate that the proposed architecture eliminates the single point of failure in centralized systems and provides scalable, cryptographically verifiable academic record integrity.

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