## 1 Introduction
Currently in the higher education system in Pakistan, there is no proper mechanism available to securely manage, trace, and provide provenance for the student's entire educational needs and requirements for attaining and verifying their degree certificate. As a result, the development and enactment of a secure, online, fully automated, and decentralized solution for degree verification, attestation, and traceability is essential to provide a transparent and traceable system to various participating stakeholders in the higher education system in Pakistan, as well as for recruitment agencies and job seekers. The higher education degree attestation and verification process involves several stakeholders. The Ministry of Federal Education is the root node of the stakeholder's hierarchy, in which the higher education commission is distributed in regional-baseddepartments in different provinces to provide easy and accessible services across different provincial headquarters. The current degree attestation and verification process involves a collaborative mechanism comprising of both online and manual process as shown in Figure 1.  
During a degree attestation and verification process, if an applicant wants to attest or verify his/her degree, they need to generate an online request through the HEC online portal. Once the request is generated, the applicant gets an appointment to submit the required list of documents online or through a designated courier service. In the next phase, the HEC starts the scrutiny process of degree verification and attestation and forwards the submitted documents to the appropriate degree issuing university or institute to verify the credentials [5; 11]. Furthermore, this process also involves various other stakeholders and subordinated HEC regulatory bodies who regulate and verify the degree verification and attestation process between the applicant and HEC and HEC to universities. The current system used by HEC involves the following stakeholders, who are directly or indirectly involved in the degree attestation process. * Federal Ministry of Education (FME)
* Higher Education Commission (HEC)
* HEC Recognized Universities and Institutes
* Employment Agencies
* Students/Candidates  
Blockchain technology serves various potential advantages in pervasive higher education, learning, and development, such as enabling students' certifications to be quickly attested and easily verified in a secure fashion [6; 9]. They could also allow to analyze forge proof versions, as well as guarantee the secrecy and integrity of their mark certificates. Moreover, there is no additional cost for permanence, accessibility, or a high level of security pertinent to preserving the data records [7]. For instance, a modular blockchain enterprise architecture of hyperledger fabric acts on a permissioned distributed ledger  
Figure 1: Current semiautomated higher education commission degree attestation and traceability architecture. technology [8]. At the same time, the HEC technical steering committee handles a diverse set of maintenance protocols and automates a configurable architecture that enables versatility, innovation, and optimization for a vast range of organizational stakeholders. This hash-encrypted distributed ledger architecture can support authored smart contacts in the general-purpose programming language, a private network that is a truly trustworthy and pluggable consensus protocol, with a more effective and customizable crash fault tolerance (CFT) [8; 9]. Through the experiment, the encrypted, hash-based transaction nodes decentralized in chronological order can succeed by avoiding administrative barriers and third-party authenticity. The higher educational degree attestation verification design performs better, allowing smooth transaction processing, confirmation latency, and transactional smart contract privacy and confidentiality. The main motivation behind this research is to address the issues and challenges of degree attestation and verification in Pakistan using blockchain technology.