Blockchain Based Framework for Document Authentication and Management of Daily Business Records

With the rise of digitization, documents are being created, modified, and shared digitally. Unlike hard copies, it is difficult to ascertain the authenticity of these digital documents. Thus, there is a need to authenticate and verify digital documents in an efficient manner. In this chapter, a decentralized application has been proposed, which uses a smart contract to facilitate the authentication and verification of documents by leveraging the blockchain technology. In contrast to the traditional way of storing the entire input digital document, this approach creates a unique fingerprint of every input document by using a cryptographic hash function. This fingerprint is stored on the blockchain network to verify the document in future. This blockchain based solution can be used by organizations to authenticate the documents that they generate and allow other entities to verify them.