A Framework for Maintaining Citizenship Record on Blockchain Amrit Jha Assam Engineering College Guwahati, Assam, India amrit15-324@aec.ac.in Rajat Kanti Bhattacharjee Assam Engineering College Guwahati, Assam, India rajatk.dev@gmail.com Meghali Nandi Assam Engineering College Guwahati, Assam, India nandimeghali@gmail.com Ferdous Ahmed Barbhuiya Indian Institute of Information Technology, Guwahati Guwahati, Assam, India ferdous@iiitg.ac.in ABSTRACT The absence of a unifed repository of citizens’ records hinders strategic planning of government for implementing welfare schemes and service delivery. Keeping a central repository of such records in traditional databases is a security concern as any data breach from the system can compromise the privacy of the citizen. Besides such a system can be misused. In this work, these problems are addressed by developing a secure and robust system for holding the identity records of all the citizens of a nation. In this paper, the capability of Blockchain for acting as a solution to the concerned problem is ex- amined. Blockchain applications inherently possess characteristics of being robust to break down, secured using cryptography and autonomous as they are capable of functioning without the need for manual intervention based on defned business logic. This paper uses the strengths of Blockchain to build a Blockchain-based sys- tem that acts as an integrated decentralized database for citizenship records of a nation. CCS CONCEPTS · Security and privacy → Trust frameworks; · Applied com- puting; KEYWORDS Blockchain, Solidity, Smart Contracts, Citizenship Record ACM Reference Format: Amrit Jha, Rajat Kanti Bhattacharjee, Meghali Nandi, and Ferdous Ahmed Barbhuiya. 2019. A Framework for Maintaining Citizenship Record on Blockchain. In 2019 ACM International Symposium on Blockchain and Secure Critical Infrastructure (BSCI ’19), July 8, 2019, Auckland, New Zealand. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3327960.3332389 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. BSCI ’19, July 8, 2019, Auckland, New Zealand © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6786-8/19/07. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3327960.3332389 1 INTRODUCTION The citizenship record of a nation is composed of basic identifca- tion details of its citizens that enable the state to recognize them distinctively. Record of the credibility of citizenship of the nationals is an obligatory step towards an efcacious world as it supports im- mensely in the various functions that the state performs. In most of the countries, the identities of the citizens are established generally via identity documents which are issued by the identity-keeping bodies whose functioning is regulated by the government of the respective country. The practice of employing centralized architec- tures for keeping records against the issued identity documents is prevalent. Cases arising from improper inclusion and exclusion of people in a central database create a cause of delinquent situation where it becomes difcult to verify the credentials or reliability of the data stored in the records. The problem of such discrepancy of citizenship was due to the improper defnition and clarity on the method of constitutional records of the citizens. As such, even if a centralized database consisting of all the citizen records is stored, the concept of immutability and non-duplication of data cannot be assured with such an implementation. The centralized database is prone to less fexibility at the local level. Accessing a database may create unresponsive server errors which can eventually lead to a prolonged time of lost services. Accordingly, the reliability over a single platform for the record keeping of the data of the citizens of a nation is a risk factor on its own. With minimal to non-redundancy, if a set of data is unexpectedly lost it would be very hard to retrieve them. Even with cloud backup systems in place and other protections, there are still risks of complete loss of data as compared to the benefts of a decentralized application. The existing systems of storing citizen record or identity record in a database is under the authority of a single body. A citizen cannot access his/her data without the consent of a member of the authority. The inclusion and updating of data also fall into their hands which is time-consuming and if errors occur, they need a much longer waiting time for rectifcation. The system may, in certain cases, fail to solve duplication of records due to forged documents. Such an approach easily falls prey to disputes related to the authenticity of data and random mutability. Session 1: Blockchain Consensus, Framework, and Architecture BSCI’19, July 8, 2019, Auckland, New Zealand 29