Digital testimonials

The Online Access Act (OZG) stipulates that citizens and companies must be able to use all administrative services directly, easily and securely online by the end of 2022 at federal, state and municipal level. An initial implementation project in Germany is digital school report cards. The challenges here are that the certificates must be forgery-proof, data protection-compliant and easy to check.

To this end, Bundesdruckerei GmbH has developed a blockchain-based solution with govdigital eG.

Technology

The "digital certificates" project is integrated into the existing infrastructure of the respective school etc. via an interface. Thanks to blockchain technology, the authenticity of the document is traceable and manipulation is impossible. For additional security, the entire blockchain infrastructure is operated by govdigital via state data centers distributed nationwide. Data sovereignty always remains with the certificate recipient. He has control over his own data at all times.

The technical process can be simplified as follows:

The issuing institution (school, university, etc.) issues the certificate including machine-readable data for the certificate holder (pupil, student, etc.). At the same time, the hash value of the certificate with the signature of the issuing institution is written to a block in the blockchain.

The blockchain is operated by a consortium on distributed infrastructure. Due to the decentralized nature of the blockchain and its resistance to forgery, it offers a high level of trust.

If the certificate holder now applies to the applying institution with the digital certificate (and thus grants access to the corresponding block of the blockchain), the institution can check the certificate for authenticity by querying the hash value in the blockchain.

Test mode

This summer, the digital school report will already be issued as a school-leaving certificate on a trial basis in the German states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Berlin. Interested federal states could also join in for the further test runs. The system is then to go live from 2023.