STORAGE AND VALIDATION OF CERTIFICATES USING CRYPTOGRAPHY

Abstract: In today’s modern world, generation of fake certificates is not a big deal. In educational institutions and Recruitment Organizations, the problem of submission of forged certificates is increasing. It is difficult for the Authorities to identify a certificate as original or modified. Storing the original certificates with Digital Signatures and Hash codes, helps us identify a certificate distinctly, later we can able to validate any copy of the certificates we stored and prove it as original one based on generation of hash code for the certificate we want to validate. Today, cryptography is used to protect digital data. It is a division of computer science that focuses on transforming data into formats that cannot be recognized by unauthorized users. A digital signature is a mathematical technique used to validate the authenticity and integrity of any data.SHA-256 is used to produce Hash codes for the certificates, it generates an almost-unique 256-bit signature for any data. SHA-256 is one of the successor hash functions to SHA-1, and is one of the strongest hash functions available.

Keywords: Cryptography, Digital signature, Hash code, SHA256.