Employer: Verify a Certificate

In this section you act as an Employer — someone who received a certificate ID from a job applicant and wants to verify its authenticity.

The Scenario

A student applies for a job and provides their certificate ID (e.g., CERT-MMOIEBEW-CJJI). The employer wants to confirm:

  • Is this certificate real?

  • Is it still valid (not revoked or expired)?

  • What course and organization issued it?

No account is needed — verification is public by design.

Step 1: Open the Cert Portal

Navigate to the Cert Portal: Open

Cert Portal Verify Page

The portal shows a clean verification interface with a search field and a QR code scanning option.

Step 2: Verify a Certificate

  1. Enter the Certificate ID you copied from the admin section (or use one from the demo data, e.g., CERT-MMOIEBEW-CJJI).

  2. Click Verify Certificate.

  3. You should see a green Valid badge with the certificate details:

    Valid Certificate Result

    • Student Name

    • Course

    • Issuing Organization

    • Issue Date and Expiry Date

Notice what’s missing: Grade and Degree are not shown. As an anonymous verifier, you only see public fields. This is the privacy enforcement — the verify-api checks the JWT (or lack thereof) and filters the response accordingly.

Step 3: Try an Invalid ID

  1. Go back to the verification page.

  2. Enter a fake ID like FAKE-CERT-123.

  3. Click Verify Certificate.

  4. You should see a Not Found result — confirming that only legitimate certificates exist on the blockchain.

    Certificate Not Found

Step 4: Verify a Revoked Certificate

If you revoked a certificate in the previous section:

  1. Enter the revoked certificate’s ID.

  2. Click Verify Certificate.

  3. You should see a red Revoked badge — the certificate was once valid but has been permanently revoked by the issuing organization.

To revoke a certificate: go back to the Course Manager → Certificates → View a certificate → click Revoke. Then re-verify it here to see the status change.

How Verification Works

The verification flow is a read-only blockchain query:

  1. The cert-portal frontend sends the certificate ID to the verify-api

  2. The verify-api calls the Fabric peer using the evaluateTransaction Gateway API

  3. The peer reads the certificate from its CouchDB state database

  4. The result is returned — no new blockchain transaction is created

This means verification is:

  • Fast — No consensus overhead (read-only)

  • Free — No ordering or endorsement cost

  • Scalable — Can scale by adding read-only peers

Privacy Summary

Viewer What They See

Anonymous (employer)

Status, student name, course, organization, dates — no grade or degree

Certificate owner (logged in)

All of the above plus grade, degree, and student ID

Admin (Course Manager)

All fields for all certificates in their organization