Wathiq (A Privacy-Preserving and Revocable Architecture for Verifiable Academic Credentials)
Supervisor Name
Mahmoud Assad
Supervisor Email
m_assad@najah.edu
University
An Najah National University
Research field
Agricultural Science
Bio
Dr Mahmoud Asaad is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering who teaches many basic and specialised courses in applied mechanics, thermodynamics, fluids, and internal combustion engines. He was the head of the mechanical engineering department at An Najah National University (2020-2023). During that period, he led the team that prepared the new curriculum for the automotive engineering branch in mechanical engineering at ANNU and new collaborations with the local companies in the automotive industry. He published several journal articles and conference papers related to thermal, automotive and transport engineering. Dr Mahmoud was a visiting researcher at the University of Paris Saclay, France, eDF France and the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland. During these visits, he also participated in many conferences and workshops in the United Kingdom, Poland, and France in the fields of specialisation and the fields of communication, leadership, and creativity. Dr Mahmoud holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, specialising in combustion and thermo-fluid sciences from the University of Manchester in 2014. He also supervised the IMechE branch at An-Najah National University since 2017."
Description
Blockchain-based academic credential systems prevent forgery but expose the full student record to verifiers, lack privacy-preserving revocation and correction, and rarely measure their cost. This project proposes Wathiq, an architecture built on the W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers standards. Credentials stay in the student's wallet; the student discloses only the requested fields and proves predicates such as "GPA ≥ 75" with a zero-knowledge proof. Revocation and correction use a bitstring status list checked locally by the verifier, whose hash is anchored in a Layer-2 smart contract to prevent issuer equivocation, while Merkle batching reduces issuance cost. No personal data is written on-chain. A prototype will be benchmarked against a traditional IPFS-and-hash baseline on disclosed data, revocation privacy, per-credential issuance cost, and proof generation and verification time.