Autonomous System for Ensuring Integrity of documents (Especially Transcript) using Secure QR Code

The use of fake mark sheets, fake transcripts, fake degree certificates and other such educational documents is often high-lighted in news channels and print media nowadays. People forge their documents to gain maliciously not only in India but the problem is prevalent worldwide including instances of students applying to US universities. Over the past few years cases involving the submission of such fake documents to acquire admission to prestigious institutions, getting jobs or promotions in their jobs have seen a rise globally. There are websites available on internet which make forged/ fake document(s) for a payment and deliver the counterfeit to any location in the world. The availability of latest printing and scanning technologies have made it easy for the criminals to create an original like fake document, which poses a serious threat to the credibility of the document issuing institution(s). At the same time it has become very difficult for the administrative bodies at colleges, universities and employers to differentiate between the original and the fake. 

Colleges, universities and companies across the country have started taking help of forensic experts who can manually verify the authenticity of submitted documents as verifying them from issuing authorities is not only costly but also turnaround time is very high. Also, most institutions (issuer of documents viz transcript etc.) do not want to expose their database for the external world from the fear of misuse including security reasons, it becomes important that a solution is developed which can verify the integrity of document without depending on issuers database in a real time and in an automatic manner.

There is a lack of automated solutions for ensuring the integrity of these educational documents. In this work, we have proposed a mechanism which uses secure QR code for protecting the integrity of educational documents. Our solution includes a module for generation of secure QR code at issuing side, verification module which uses Public Key Cryptography for ensuring the document integrity at the verification side. Verification module can smartly identify changes into the document and decide whether the changes originated from a tampering attempt or due to OCR errors. 

In this work, we have designed and implemented secure QR code for mark sheets and other educational documents and demonstrated how these can be validated successfully using QR code without depending on any external sources (database query from the document issuing authority). With this system in place, it is next to impossible to create fake mark sheets. We have incorporated several innovative techniques to overcome the limitations of OCR errors; thus we are able to detect intentional tampering. Entire process is fully automated, efficient, and verification can be done using an application (freely available at issuing authority website) in an offline, real-time manner and result will not only verify the integrity of the submitted document (image taken either by scanner or digital camera or phone camera) but also highlight what has been tampered in case of forged/ fake document. A sample implementation on CBSE 12th class transcript is shown below

Original Sample Transcript

Questioned Transcript 

 

Resultant Integrity Verification