Abstract:
In Sri Lanka, the land administration process has not been digitized, which has led to plenty of conflicts in determining the real ownership of lands and drastically increasing the land transaction processing time, which has resulted in many fraudulent activities concerning land management. The existing system is majorly paper-based and centralized. Administrators who have the powers to alter the system according to their wishes hold a huge threat for information security and is a centralized system that bears the risk of a single point of failure. Hence, transitioning into another system that could mitigate the drawbacks in the current land authentication system has become a vital need and currently, the knowledge regard this area is very much limited. The decentralized nature of the blockchain-based system has the potential of diluting major limitations in the current system. The overall objective of this research is to mitigate fraudulent activities in land authentication systems through the blockchainbased technological approach. A prototype of a smart contractbased model has been created and verified with the involvement of the actual users. Since the smart contract-based land authentication model verifies the land ownership within a short period, the transaction processing time narrows down from a few months to a couple of minutes. The results show signs of considerable improvements in the efficiency and the security of the land authentication process, the users who interacted with the prototype and presented positive comments.