  Credential fraud is a widespread practice that undermines investment and
confidence in higher education systems and bears significant economic and
social costs. Legacy credential verification systems are typically
time-consuming, costly, and bureaucratic, and struggle against certain classes
of credential fraud. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive blockchain-based
credential verification solution, Cerberus, which is considerably more
efficient, easy and intuitive to use, and effectively mitigates widespread
manifestations of credential fraud. Cerberus also improves significantly upon
other blockchain-based solutions in the research literature: it adheres closely
to the existing credential verification ecosystem, it addresses a threat model
informed by real-world fraud scenarios. Moreover, Cerberus uses on-chain smart
contracts for credential revocation, and it does not entail students or
employers to manage digital identities or cryptographic credentials to use the
system. We prototype our solution and describe our attempt to design an online
verification service with a rich feature set, including data privacy,
transcript verification, and selective disclosure of data. We hope this effort
contributes positively to towards alleviating the problem of fake credentials.
