# Challenges of Using Blockchain in the Education Sector: A Literature Review
## 3 Results
### Challenges of Blockchain in Education
#### 3.2.1 Technological Barriers
_Challenge 4: Privacy_  
Ensuring privacy while providing security on the blockchain is challenging, but it is critical, particularly when a learner's educational diplomas and certificates are under threat [18]. Seven of the selected articles in this review [7; 27; 28; 29; 44; 45; 46] discussed privacy issues in the educational field. Since privacy in the blockchain is difficult to achieve, it is a challenge in several academic usage scenarios that deal with sensitive data. The issue of transactions being open to anyone in the blockchain may compromise privacy, as this data could be collected and publicly revealed elsewhere [18]. Many educational institutions nowadays adhere to strict privacy policies that are legally mandated. Students put their trust in those holding their personal information. However, if all this information is kept in a public ledger, it will no longer be considered private. Here, even when encrypted, public blockchains are ineffective for storing this data [27]; hence, a private blockchain or consortium could be useful, where the students will have restricted access and all of their personal information will be kept private, as it should be [44]. Despite this, several regulations in various countries for securing personal information should be considered. For example, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [46] is a significant limitation in Europe and does not allow the storage of personal data in an unchanged storage system, such as a blockchain [45]. In addition, the data must be anonymized. Therefore, this is a contentious issue that needs to be resolved before blockchain can be used to register learners' and educators' personal information in the educational field. However, hashing personal data, as utilized in several projects, cannot be considered an anonymization approach under the GDPR rules [29; 44; 45; 46]. An asymmetric cryptography mechanism is used to protect the information in distributed ledgers. However, while password security solutions allow users to update their passwords if they are stolen or lost, there is no mechanism in distributed ledgers to recover lost private keys. Thus, when a user in a blockchain loses their private key, they lose all of their data and assets permanently [29]. Furthermore, in the case of the education arena, if the accreditation authority's private key is hacked or lost, the entire system may be compromised [46]. Therefore, this privacy issue is a core reason why the public may not adopt blockchain technology. Additionally, the blockchain's immutability makes it hard to change or remove data, even for legal reasons, which conflicts with the GDPR's right to be forgotten. However, one study on blockchains in the education field aimed to employ blockchain and its immutability properties to secure the issuing of academic certificates for students, offering a way to revoke digital certificates that have been granted improperly [7]. To address the privacy issues in the blockchain, different privacy-preserving solutions, such as secure multi-party computation (SMPC) techniques, commitment schemes, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), ring signatures, zkSNARK, and homomorphic hiding are emerging as ways to provide users with techniques to become anonymized and keep control of their data throughout any transactions in the blockchain [67]. _Challenge 5: Immutability and Lack of Flexibility_  
An immutable record in a blockchain is one where the state cannot be changed after it has been created [9]. Thus, security and the traditional properties of confidentiality, integrity, and availability are all linked to immutability [19]. However, in five of the reviewed articles [9; 19; 43; 47; 48], immutability was considered a challenge in terms of adopting blockchain in the education sector. Because a blockchain block is constantly replicated in several different locations, it cannot easily be modified.