Enhance Authenticity with Digital Certificate

How Does a Digital Certificate Prove Authenticity?

Several IT companies got to know a few months back that the ‘qualified’ individuals they’d hired were not qualified at all. They had forged or duplicated fake certificates and used those to land lucrative jobs. Sounds extremely simple and out of the realm of possibility, right? But it’s true and the primary reason is a lack of a system and solution to prove the authenticity of the fake certificates. However, not all is lost. Blockchain-backed digital certificates are the answer to this growing problem.

What is a Digital Certificate?

Verifiable credentials, or blockchain-backed digital certificates, are a document digital that might be a web copy of a physical certificate or generated from scratch. These documents are hosted on the blockchain and share this decentralized technology’s various characteristics. For instance, they honor the transparent, trustless, and security mechanisms blockchain is known for. In fact, a digital certificate will only be considered a verifiable credential if it is issued in alignment with the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0. The laid down rules state that a digital credential must be verifiable by machines, employ privacy-enhancing technologies like decentralized identifiers (DIDs), and secured cryptographically. While all these properties make digital certificates secure and trust-worthy, what’s preventing the bad actors and fake certificate providers from adopting this technology and using it to their benefit?

Digital Signature Helps Prove Authenticity

Blockchain-backed digital certificates are trust-worthy because they are also a digital signature certificate. This doesn’t mean that they require a simple digital signature like most digital documents. They require a cryptographically-secure digital signature. Moreover, not anyone can generate the document. The issuer must be authorized to issue the documents. If they are not authorized, they can’t generate legitimate blockchain-backed digital certificates. Upon issuance, the issuer needs to use their private keys to cryptographically sign the document and authenticate its contents. Again, this adds another level of security to the whole process. But the real authentication process kicks in when the certificate holder presents it to the verifier for verification and they check the digital certificate on a blockchain network. When a certificate is presented for authentication, the verifier can view the certificate’s issuance date, expiration date, the authority who issued the certificate, and if the certificate has been tampered with since. Having ready answers to all these questions gives the verifier confidence and simplifies the process of authenticity. Moreover, the meta data, claim, and description provided in a digital certificate make it extremely simple to verify the contents and determine if the presented digital certificate is real or not. So, don’t wait any longer. Sign up on ProofEasy today to take advantage of digital certificates and make document authenticity a breeze. Better yet, the solution’s customizable API layer makes it the ideal partner for your existing IT infrastructure. You also wouldn’t have to fork out a lot of money to use the solution. Contact the ProofEasy team today!