Graduation Certificate Verification Model: A Preliminary Study

• Published in: International journal of advanced computer science & applications 2019, Vol.10 (7)
• Main Authors: Sale, Omar S, Ghazali, Osman, Al, Qusay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Authenticity; Certificates; Computer science; Documents; Education; Forgery; Photocopying; Software; Verification
• ISSN: 2158-107X; 2156-5570
• DOI: 10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100777

Graduation certificates issued by universities and other educational institutions are one of the most important documents for a graduate. It is a proof of graduate’s qualifications and can be used to advance forward in one’s career and life. However, due to advances in software, printing and photocopying technologies, forgery of those certificates is made easy and as good as the original, making them difficult to detect. Several universities and educational institutions as well as businesses started to dedicate resources for verifying certificates however that is usually a tedious and quite costly process and there isn't a clear model that can be adopted by those institutions that could minimize cost and speed up the process. There are many techniques proposed for paper based document verification and this paper analyzes and expatiate the issues on those techniques. Most of the verification techniques require change in the process of certificate generation either by changing template, changing paper, changing printers, adding hardware or even adding extra information. This change may mean that the university or verifier needs the proper knowledge to execute and run the proposed technique. This also means that older certificates may not work with the newly introduced techniques. To also add some proposed techniques require a change that is not always easy or cheap like in creating a third body to verify certificates.