ENHANCED SECURITY FOR ONLINE EXAMS USING GROUP CRYPTOGRAPHY

PROJECT REPORT

Submitted by

AJAI KUMAR. M Register No.: 283475002

PRAVIN KUMAR. S Register No.: 283475097

SURENDRA PRASANNA. R Register No.: 283475151

Under the guidance of

Mr. V. SIVABALAN

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree

of

BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

SRI MANAKULA VINAYAYAGAR ENGINEERING COLLEGE

MADAGADIPET, PUDUCHERRY-605107

NOV-2010
 SRI MANAKULA VINAYAGAR ENGINEERING COLLEGE

PONDICHERRY UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

BONAFIDE CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the project work entitled “ENHANCED SECURITY FOR ONLINE
EXAMS USING GROUP CRYPTOGRAPHY” is a bonafide work done by AJAI KUMAR.
M [REGISTER NO.: 283475002], PRAVIN KUMAR. S [REGISTER NO.: 283475097] and
SURENDRA PRASANNA. R [REGISTER NO.: 283475151] in partial fulfillment of the
requirement, for the award of B.Tech Degree in Computer Science and Engineering by
Pondicherry University during the academic year 2010-2011.

PROJECT GUIDE HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT

Submitted for the University Examination held on ……………………………..

INTERNAL EXAMINER EXTERNAL EXAMINER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
 We are grateful to our Chairman Mr. N. KESAVAN. He has been a constant source of
inspiration right from the beginning.

We would like to express our faithful and grateful thanks to our Managing Director, Mr.
M. DHANASEKARAN for his support.

We would also like to thank our Vice Chairman Mr. S. V. SUGUMARAN, for providing
us with pleasant learning environment.

We would also like to extend our sincere gratitude and grateful thanks to our Principle,
Dr. V. S. K. VENGATACHALAPATHY for having extended the Research and Development
facilities of the department.

We also sincerely thank our Head of the Department, Mr. K. PREMKUMAR whose
continuous encouragement and sufficient comments enabled us to complete our project.

We are very thankful and grateful to our beloved guide, Mr. V.SIVABALAN whose
great support in valuable advices, suggestions and tremendous help enabled us in completing the
first phase of our project. He has been a great source of inspiration to us.

We thank all our staff members who have been by our side always and helped us with
our project.

We wish to thank our family members and friends for their constant encouragement,
constructive criticisms and suggestions with regards to this project review.

Last but not the least; we would like to thank the ALMIGHTY for His grace and
blessings over us throughout the project.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER NO TITLE PAGE NO

1 ABSTRACT

2 LIST OF FIGURES

3 LIST OF TABLES

4 LIST OF
ABBREVATION
 CHAPTER 1

ENHANCED SECURITY FOR ONLINE EXAMS USING GROUP

CRYPTOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION:

While development of the Internet has contributed to the spread of online education, online
exams have not been widely adopted. An online exam is defined here as one that takes place over
the insecure Internet, and where no proctor is in the same location as the examinees. This paper
proposes an enhanced secure online exam management environment mediated by group
cryptography using remote monitoring and control of ports and input. The target domain of this
paper is that of exams in online university courses with students in remote locations.

To remove the requirement for human intervention in secure online exam management so as to
capitalize on the advantages of online processes, this paper proposes a solution to the issue of
security and cheating for online exams. This solution uses an enhanced Security Control system
in the Online Exam which is based on group cryptography with an e-monitoring scheme. The
cryptography supports enhanced security control for the online exam process, as well as
authentication and integrity. The e-monitoring provides a proctor function to remote examinees
to prevent cheating, and thus removes the requirement of having to go to a fixed location.

This paper addresses the problem of administering an online exam at a fixed time with the same
questions for all examinees, just like an off-line exam, but without restricting the physical
location of the examinees. As the system enables many kinds of tests to be given online, it can
provide teachers with better evaluation standards for students and may contribute to improving
the quality of education.
LITERATURE SURVEY:

In the literature survey phase, the following papers are read on behalf of project which are
described in detail then:

 A Secure E-Exam Management System

 A Secure Examination System with Multi-Mode Input on the World-Wide Web
 An Integrated Solution for Secure Group Communication in Wide-Area Networks

A Secure E-Exam Management System

Secure electronic exams are one of the most difficult challenges in e-learning security. The
relevance of the examination process for any academic institution implies that different security
mechanisms must be applied in order to preserve some security properties during different
examination stages. In this paper, we present a secure e-exam management system where all
exam related information is in digital format. We propose a cryptographic scheme that
has to be executed in order to achieve the desired security
levels at every exam stage.

A Secure Examination System with Multi-Mode Input on the

World-Wide Web

A Web-based examination system is presented which ensures secure transactions between the
examination server and the candidates by employing special authentication protocols. A novel
feature of the system is its support for formulae and graph input which makes it suitable for non-
choice-based examinations. Authentication requires different protocols and different tools, which
cannot be derived directly from the secure communication facilities available to the Web.

An Integrated Solution for Secure Group Communication in

Wide-Area Networks

Many distributed applications require a secure reliable group communication system to provide
coordination among the application components. This paper describes a secure group layer
(SGL) which bundles a reliable group communication system, a group authorization and access
control mechanism, and a group key agreement protocol to provide a comprehensive and
practical secure group communication platform. SGL also encapsulates the standard message
security services (i.e. confidentiality, authenticity and integrity). A number of challenging issues
encountered in the design of SGL are brought to light and experimental results obtained with a
prototype implementation are discussed.
EXISTING SYSTEM
An Online exam generally takes place in a customary situation where the Examinees must
come to a common place to attend the exams. There must be a sure presence of invigilator in
order to avoid malpractices that can take place during exam period. In these online exams
security is in the basic level so that it could not withstand more number of attacks. There is a
possibility of performing active attacks i.e. an intruder can intimate as an examinee.

However, e-learning (or in general distance learning) universities rely on an examination

process in which students hold a face to face exam in a physical place determined by the
university under supervised conditions. Such conditions ensure the correctness of the exam, a
difficult task to achieve in a virtual exam model. Face to face exams allow to check students
identity and ensure exam authoring using traditional means (checking an identity card and
ensuring no one helps the student during the exam).

Ensure student identity and authoring in a virtual or distance exam has been pointed out as a
hard problem in the literature with a difficult solution. Then, e-learning institutions still need
face to face exams. However, face to face exams represent an important effort for e-learning
institutions. Typically, e-learning universities do not have enough physical facilities for all
students so they have to rent buildings in order to allow students to hold their exams.
Furthermore, exam management becomes more complex since such external examination
centers must be provided with all management mechanism to ensure that students will be
able to perform their exam in a desired location and later on, all exam answers will be
properly collected and sent to the teachers that have to correct them. For all those reasons,
improving exam management systems has clear advantages for distance learning institutions.
PROPOSED SYSTEM:

The proposal for secure online exams was based on a secure exam protocol with an
omnipotent central manager who controlled all the information for students, teachers,
problem sheets, answer sheets, and grades. The weakness of this system was that the
manager was assumed to be absolutely honest. Moreover, a restricted room was required for
the exam, to prevent cheating.

The security problems related to online exams include not only unauthorized access to the
problem sheets before the exams, but also modification of the questions, the answers,
and the grades. Cheating on off-line exams is also a big problem. According to some studies
as the level of communication between teachers and students decreases, the tendency to cheat
increases. This effect has a direct impact on online exams, when students
may have little contact with their teachers.

The consideration of secure group composition, secure intergroup communication using a

public key, and secure intragroup communication using the symmetric key through
the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. This paper adopts two groups for secure communication
between distributed entities in the online exam system. The intergroup communication is
protected through public key infrastructure (PKI), while intragroup communication uses
several symmetric Diffie-Hellman keys.
MODULES:

1. EXAM SETUP MODULE

2. AUTHENTICATION MANAGEMENT MODULE
3. PROBLEM/ANSWER MANAGEMENT MODULE
4. AUDIO AND VIDEO STREAM MANAGEMENT MODULE
5. EXAM STATE MANAGEMENT MODULE
6. GRADE MANAGEMENT MODULE
7. INTRA GROUP COMMUNICATION CONTROL MODULE.
SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE:

CLASS DIAGRAM:
Check Pwd ()
Check Ds ()
Confirm IP ()

DATA FLOW DIAGRAM:

STATE DIAGRAM:
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
Hardware Requirements:

1. Processor- Pentium IV,450 Mhz,512 Cache Memory.

2. Memory - 512 MB RAM
3. Hard Disk - 10 GB
4. Screen Resolution – 800 X 600 (Recommended)
5. Web Cam –HQ
6. Microphone

Software Requirements:

1. Operating System – Windows Xp

2. Language -- Java Script, PHP
3. Database -- My SQL
4. Server -- Apache