An Efficient Blockchain and Smart Contracts Based Approach for Document Verification

Many users upload documents to the cloud to be shared and verified by third-party people before they get access to digital services, e.g. opening a bank account, healthcare service, and making payments online. The documents include everything from a UID (unique identifying digit), Know your customer (KYC), company data, and files are uploaded and verified at a significant rate by an authorized third party. This process involves the transfer of sensitive data over the internet, and tracking the usage of the data by the users is almost impossible. This poses a significant disadvantage for the user as he/she cannot know if the data is being used for the intended purpose or not. The proposed approach in this paper provides secure data transfer to the intended party as well as a way to verify that the intended third party is only accessing the data for the intended purpose. With the use of smart contracts in this approach, the document can be masked with some random content when the intended task is completed and can provide a means to check if the data is being used for the intended purpose or not. It is found from the results that the proposed approach performs better than the existing approaches in terms of computational cost and monetary cost. Also, the overall execution time of the document verification process is improved, and would also allow the user to track the status of the document in the verification process with the help of the status tab.