Pitney Bowes: Curbing Certificate Forgery with Cutting Edge Technology

Education is a crucial part of our lives and a good degree or diploma from a college can promise a bright career. This has resulted in a diploma or a degree from a good college becoming one of the most sought-after necessities today. However, it has given rise to an alarming trend – Falsifying or forging these credentials. Individuals or institutes offering forged certification, popularly known as degree or diploma mills, are becoming a menace today. In a billion-dollar industry, it not only hampers the reputation of educational institutes but also results in varied organisations where these are submitted, expending huge amounts and efforts in verifying these credentials.

Various solutions in the market offer university degree verification but they are far from perfect. Document encryption on the other hand provides heightened security. By converting and securing the raw data into an encrypted format, which can then be embedded into the issued degree as a bar code, the threat of tampering can be eliminated. It is a proven technology and is fail-safe even when photocopied. The encrypted information can be easily verified with the online repository.

Benefits of Document Encryption

  • Official, portable, and verifiable electronic version of a document
  • Employers can use electronic identifier to verify the authenticity of a document
  • Universities can provide certificate validation services from their website
  • Trusted and widely acceptable since document is digitally signed and encrypted

Secure Evidencing Solutions provide tamper-proof evidence that a transaction took place. Typically, there is an ‘issuer’ — an entity that initiates the transaction and a ‘verifier — someone who can independently verify that the transaction occurred.

How pbSecure™ helps curb forgery?

Pitney Bowes (PB) is the only mainstream solutions provider with a direct presence in India. As the leading provider for pre and post-print solutions and equipment, PB has developed pbSecure™ to provide high-security encryption that leverages industry leading cryptography technology. Issuers can produce credentials that are verifiable in real-time using a public key certificate.

pbSecure™ offers three layers of protection — it encrypts vital information at the point of origin, verifies decrypted information, and provides proof of authenticity.

Easy to Implement

pbSecure™ ensures certi?cation issuance without high IT infrastructure or administrative costs, which helps:

  • Avoid complex document management involving storage, hash, and digital document management
  • Eliminate digital safes

Highly secure solution that discourages forgery

Online solutions rely on sophisticated strategies to secure the storage of data. However, these solutions are susceptible to hacking. pbSecure™ provides a hybrid solution, which is hacker-safe since any data tampering is detectable. All records that may have been hacked will fail veri?cation. Since scanning can be done through multiple channels — online, offline or through a smartphone app, traditional forgery methods are discouraged. (Data Reference – 2016 NAFSA Annual Conference)

“Document encryption is an effective tool to curb document forgery. The first step for educational institutes is to determine their existing security measures and ascertain if it is enough to secure their certificates. From there on, decisions on investing in the right technology can be taken to drive operational benefits. We are happy to launch the whitepaper on our solution approach to this challenge, you can access the whitepaper at www. pitneybowes.com/in/shipping-andmailing/ security/pbsecure” – Venkat Rao, Country Director, Pitney Bowes India.

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