Authenticating official documents using the Blockchain

Authenticating documents with the blockchain

The State of Geneva carried out a proof of concept study for Geneva's Office du registre du commerce (Trade and Companies Register). The goal was to assess the usage of the blockchain for authenticating the documents produced by the State of Geneva's administration and delivered to the citizens. The solution consists of two parts: a timestamping system and a validation system. The two systems get involved in the following interaction between the citizen and the Register:

1. The citizen requests an extract from the Register, related to a company of their choice.
2. The Register officer creates the extract and uploads it to the timestamping system. The timestamping system records a hash of the file on the Ethereum blockchain and creates a timestamping receipt file.
3. The Register officer sends the extract file and the timestamping receipt file to the citizen, via email. Both files are in PDF format. At this stage the citizen has an extract, but they have no guarantee as regards whether the extract is a genuine one; This is in contrast with the paper document - fully signed and stamped - that they would have obtained by physically going to the administration counter.
4. The citizen, or any person to whom they handed the extract to, browses to the validation system. The citizen uploads the extract file and the timestamping receipt file. The system checks the blockchain and returns a validity response. If the response is positive, the citizen is assured that the extract is genuine.

Both systems are implemented as Web applications, so they are accessible using any browser, e.g., Firefox, Chrome or Edge.

Although the project is specifically tuned for extracts of the Trade and Companies Register, it can be easily retargeted to authenticate documents of any kind.

Open source licence: AGPL 3

The project is published with licence AGPL v3. This licence has been written by the Free Software Foundation.

The State of Geneva is encouraging any IT community to contribute to the source code of this application through this platform.