Education Passport

Throughout the Education Sector, traditional paper-based certificates are still widely used today. While some universities do issue digital copies of certificates in addition to paper originals, they cannot always be easily verified and people still have to rely on paper certificates for job or higher education applications.

This means that not only do major institutions and schools spend enormous amounts on storing this information, but authorities have to bear significant costs associated with printing paper certificates. Since the security features in the physical certificate are directly linked to the  difficulty level and expertise required to author the document, the result is that, the more secure the certificate, the more expensive it is to produce.

The TrustGrid™ Education Passport enables organisations to move from paper-based certificates, to an entirely digital certificate system. This gives the individual instant access to and total control over their own certificates and accreditations, and dramatically reduces costs for the educational institution. No more printing, physical certificate posting, certifying and checking – it all happens in instant, secure, and fully-verified digital transactions.

There is currently no unified verification process that can be used reliably and easily to verify the validity of a certificate. This means that educational institutions have to process thousands of requests from different organizations for sending copies of documents. If someone wants to verify certificates, for example to verify claims in a CV, they need to read and verify each certificate individually and manually, which is a significantly time-consuming process.

At the same time, issuers have to retain a central register of issued certificates that may be used to verify certificate authenticity. Answering queries as to the validity of certificates is a manual process which requires significant human resources.

The Education Passport uses the patent-pending TrustGrid™ technology, enabling each individual’s certifications to be securely stored against their verified identity – then shared and verified independently by each educational institution on request.

Without a universally-established open standard for digital certificates, this can lead to certificates which can only be verified within the context of specific software ecosystems.

At the moment, any agencies/organisations issuing digital certificates (such as universities) operate in their own security domains. Such agencies (acting as certificate registries) are single points of failure; while the certificates may remain valid, the ability to verify them could be lost.

Each of these agencies employs their own chain of trust, and there are multiple trust anchors in use.  Often, issued digital credentials are not cryptographically bound to their issuers, as well as to the owners of the credentials, making the verification process difficult, unreliable and slow.

Another major concern with digital certificate services is federated management of a customer’s data. When all data resides on a centralised federated system, individual users, such as students and teachers, do not have visibility of how their data is being used and cannot control access to their data.

The TrustGrid™ Education Passport places control and visibility into the hands, and mobile phone, of the individual – while increasing the security of, and access to, their data.

Centralised issuance of certificates is always going to be susceptible to risk, manipulation or in the worst cases, fraud. For example, the certificates received by a candidate upon completion of a course show that they have achieved the expected skills and knowledge required to successfully complete said course. 

However, the certificates can be forged, and the process of validating the authenticity of the issued certificate is expensive and slow. The TrustGrid™ Education Passport mitigates the risk of hiring or admitting unqualified candidates who may have forged their credentials.