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The ongoing push for the 4th industrial revolution is setting the stage to digitise, persist and verify identity along with credentials. Academic and skills credentials are currently verified manually and have much scope for automation using cryptographic techniques but requires standardisation to facilitate future systems interoperability. The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Verifiable Credentials (VC) standards presents the possibility to achieve this credential verification automation. To accomplish this, an understanding of various DLTs and requirements for a viable skills tracking system is important. Therefore, this research aims to access the selected DLTs against the assessment criterion presented and an analysis has been completed to determine which DLT is suitable for the proposed system. The DLTs are assessed in terms of their ability to support the rapid prototyping of such a system and provide recommendations to guide a future development path from the perspective of standards compliance. We conclude that few DLTs possess the maturity to provide proper requirements coverage due to the emergent nature of the DLT space. Additionally, this paper presents the high-level requirements to achieve a minimally viable solution that can demonstrate such digital credential verification in the academic and skills tracking context.

Even with the ability to produce documents digitally, the paperless environment has yet to become a reality in South Africa. Hardcopy documents are still printed daily which makes them susceptible to document fraud. In South Africa, a case was reported recently, where someone who was creating fake documents was exposed. This introduces the challenge when using hardcopy documents which is loss of integrity. Thus, it is vital to have systems in place to verify document integrity and be able to determine when a document has been tampered with. Various techniques have been used to secure documents, yet the challenge persists. The combination of 2D barcodes, digital signatures, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), cryptographic hashing has proved the potential to achieve good results when combined. Recently, blockchain has been added as one of the techniques to be employed for document verification. This paper presents a proposed solution that incorporates the combination of 2D barcodes, OCR, cryptographic hashing and blockchain. As this is still on-going work, experiments are still required to demonstrate the viability of the solution.

The issue of hardcopy document forgery is still prevalent. In South Africa, a series of cases have been reported where academic documents are forged. This poses a problem of integrity, trust and authentication of hardcopy documents. Therefore, it is vital to have a system that could verify a hardcopy document and ensure that the integrity is maintained at all times. Various techniques have been introduced to eliminate the issue of document forgery, namely; cryptographic hashing, 2D barcodes, Digital Signatures and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In this paper, we present our proposed solution which comprises the 4 techniques. The first part of the implementation included the use of OCR and the experimental results yielded an accuracy of 100%. While this is on-going work, the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution.