Diploma Digital UFSC

As part of the presentations that happened between September 23, 2019 and September 26, 2019 at DocEng 2019 in Berlin, Germany we are publishing here.

The XSD file that we used for the experiment are here: diplomaDigital

Our presentation is here: DOCEng 2019 – Digital Degree Certificates for Higher Education in Brazil

The link for the paper is here: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3345398

The abstract for the paper is here: Higher Education Degree Certificates in Brazil are a tool for social mobility. Access to higher education is still an issue in a developing economy with continental size and historic inequalities. Some people see this combination as an opportunity to exploit the system, producing fake degree certificates, or issuing official degree certificates to people that did not enrol in courses. Degree certificates can be easily bought in the country and they produce the desired social ascension. To tackle that, the Brazilian Ministry of Education enacted a regulation instituting the Digital Degree Certificate for higher education. The regulation only specifies that the degree certificates must be digitally signed with the country’s official PKI. This regulation does not bring the technical details of how this can be implemented. We aim to discuss these problems of the Degree Certificates’ black-market in Brazil, its social consequences, and how a technical specification for that regulation can be conceived and put in practice following the ministerial regulation. The outcome of this research is a proposal for implementing digitally signed degree certificates that fulfil the legal requirements in Brazil, as well as can be easily integrated with computerized information systems and that can be maintained securely in the long term.