A Framework for Enhancing Digital Trust of Quranic Text Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

The Holy Quran is the fundamental Islamic scripture revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings of Allah be upon him) for the past 1400 years. In today’s Internet, there exist online sources which provide incomplete or false Quranic text which may either be published deliberately or unintentionally. The research investigates the possibility of developing a digital trust framework that secures the integrity of the Quranic text using blockchain technology. The research uses blockchain technology as the emerging secured distributed ledger to establish digital trust. The Ethereum blockchain platform was used to validate the proposed framework. The proposed digital trust framework was developed in a three-level architecture consisting of participants, digital trust and Quranic text. The key components of the proposed framework were found useful in Ethereum blockchain platform for effective use in distributed ledger, distributed consensus, smart contract, decentralized application development and cryptographic algorithms for database encryption and user authentication in Whisper, Swarm and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The findings show the effectiveness, efficiency and usability of the proposed digital trust framework on the Ethereum blockchain platform and demonstrate how user of Quran and blockchain miner interact with the system to verify and validate Quranic content. The research has recommended the use of blockchain technology to secure the integrity of the Quranic text. The work facilitates the protection of the Quranic text as well as proving a mean to verify the authenticity of the Quranic content.