The Vision of a Global Academic Database of Degree Certificates

We envision a global academic database of degree certificates issued by universities and other entities whose users are identifiable through biometrics. The goal is to eliminate the existence of fraudulent documents, while at the same time guaranteeing the long-term availability of documents for users. In this context, we are working on addressing three key challenges: (1) Ensuring that nodes in a storage network keep the documents they are expected to store with sufficient replication degree. (2) Tying documents issued by institutions to real persons using biometrics. (3) Novel communication abstractions for building consensus and reconfiguration algorithms that can help to simplify development of complex systems, such as our global academic database.