Blockchain-Based Secure Land Certificate Storage with Encryption and Digital Signatures

Abstract

This paper presents a blockchain-based digital land certificate system designed to prevent forgery, data manipulation, and document duplication in conventional centralized land certificate management systems. The system adopts a four-layer architecture built on a six-node Hyperledger Besu network using the Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance (IBFT 2.0) consensus protocol, with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) providing encrypted file storage and a Solidity smart contract managing on-chain metadata. Document confidentiality is ensured through AES-256-CBC encryption, integrity through SHA-256 hashing, and authenticity through the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). A centralized-signing, decentralized-verification model reflects the existing authority structure of the National Land Agency while ensuring that all records remain tamper-evident, and a public QR-code mechanism enables certificate verification without exposing the original document. Performance evaluation on commodity hardware shows that cryptographic operations complete in under 13 ms, IPFS upload and download operations average 40-49 ms and 2.6-8.3 ms, respectively, and on-chain metadata recording requires an average of 4,151 ms with a standard deviation of only 10.97 ms. A node-failure scenario confirms automatic failover with only a 4.9% increase in latency, while all tamper-detection and unauthorized-access scenarios are successfully identified and handled. These results demonstrate that the proposed system enhances the security, integrity, transparency, and authenticity of digital land certificates.