PoA-PBFT Blockchain Architecture Design for Authentication and Identity Protection in Electronic Passports

Centralized e-passport infrastructures remain vulnerable to forgery, data manipulation, and single points of failure, undermining both national and international identity management systems’ integrity and transparency. These limitations restrict real-time cross-agency verification and create dependencies on centralized authorities. This study introduces a permissioned blockchain model designed to enable decentralized trust, institutional accountability, and fault-tolerant verification to overcome these challenges. The proposed framework integrates certified government entities, such as the Ministry of Immigration and Corrections and the Directorate General of Immigration, within a secure validation network governed by a National Certificate Authority (CA). This paper proposes a hybrid blockchain architecture that combines PoA for institutional legitimacy with PBFT for deterministic consensus and data immutability. All passport-related transactions, including issuance, renewal, and revocation are validated through smart contracts and recorded in a distributed ledger, ensuring secure, transparent, and interoperable data exchange compliant with ICAO standards. The model demonstrates that blockchain can be feasibly applied to national e-passport infrastructures, thereby establishing a digital identity ecosystem that is tamper-resistant and auditable. Future work includes implementing a prototype using Hyperledger Fabric to evaluate latency, throughput, and consensus efficiency.