SECURITY AND INTEGRITY OF RESULT COMPUTATIONS IN CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT

ABSTRACT

There is a growing trend of using cloud environments for ever growing storage and data   processing needs. However, adopting a cloud computing paradigm may have positive as well as negative effects on the data security of servicing consumers.   The focus of this research is on the development of a proof-of- concept  system for  security and  integrity  of result  computations  in a cloud computing environment by implementing  a four level cloud based application security gateway methodology for result computations that would help protect data from all forms of un-authorized access . The application was developed using PHP, Hypertext pre-processor, AJAX, JavaScript, Extended markup language (XML) and  MySql database as the backend engine.

The developed system evaluation and testing show a significant difference in system response time, data consistency,  availability of large storage capacity to meet increasing demand of data and secured access gateway to vital recourses.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background  of the Study

Generally  it  is  known  that  in  our  knowledge  and  technology-driven  global village, each country’s economic and social well-being depends on its ability to harness  its  human  resources  through  a  dynamic  and  innovative  educational system that thrives on and propels technological  development.  This required link between educational and technological development is particularly critical at  the  higher  levels  of  the  educational  system,  and  especially,  university education. Internet connectivity and various forms of web-enabled technologies are  growing  exponentially,  and  more  and  more  information  is  becoming available on-line, thereby opening up new information research and networking opportunities. These developments are erasing the traditional borders and boundaries  of  learning,  and  leading  to  radical  changes  in  the  activities  of scholarly communities. Modern university education now depends on a robust programme of automated information services to support and facilitate teaching, learning, research and management. This scenario of accelerated technological change poses new challenges and opportunities for universities, and Nigerian universities  must re-position  themselves  quickly and continuously to exploit prevailing information technologies to efficiently meet their teaching, learning and research mission. This research work is therefore centered on cloud computing which is an unexplored technology most especially in the Education. Cloud computing is a recent concept that is still evolving across the information technology industry and academia. Several definitions have evolved so far, the National  Institute  of  Standards  and  Technology  (Mell  and  Grance,  2011), defines  cloud  computing  as  “a  model  for  enabling  convenient,  on-demand network  access  to a shared  pool of configurable  computing  resources  (e.g., networks,  servers,  storage,  applications,  and  services)  that  can  be  rapidly

provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction ˮ. There are three major types of cloud computing services: First, Processing Clouds that provide scalable and mostly affordable computing resources that run enterprise programs, which is also sometimes known as Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Secondly,   Storage Clouds that offer an alternative to local file systems also known as   Platform as a Service (PaaS), and thirdly, Application Clouds that allow a thin client to interact with services that are completely hosted on an external infrastructure also called Software as a Service (SaaS) (Ajith and Hemalatha, 2012).

The basic principle of cloud computing entails the reduction of in-house data centres and the delegation of a portion or all of the Information Technology infrastructure capability to a third party. This holds the promise of driving down cost while fostering innovation and promoting educational development. Institutions of higher learning, such as Universities and Colleges, are the core of innovation through their advanced research and development. Subsequently, higher Institutions may benefit greatly by exploiting the power of cloud computing,  including  cost  cutting  as  well  as  all  the  above  types  of  cloud services (Goetzinger, 1962). This research work presents a frame work for implementing necessary security and integrity of result computation in cloud computing  environment  in tertiary institutions  in Nigeria.  Mathematically,  a result is a quantity or expression obtained by calculation after an examination while  result  computation  is a mathematical  process  or calculation  involving numbers or quantities obtained from the outcome of an examination based on institutional rules guiding result computation. Nigerian Universities are facing problems in providing necessary Information Technology (IT) support for educational, research and development activities. Every year, lots of data are collected, used and stored in Nigerian Universities, such as student’s personal information, admission details, courses offered, examination scores, etc. These data increases every year as the number of students increases and must be made

available or accessible, even many years after completion of a programme from a University which could span for a minimum of four years. These large volume of data requires lots of storage and computing resources such as speed, storage memory, efficiency, etc.

1.2 Statement of Problem

The entire process of result computation begins with the collation of individual course  lecturer’s  result  or  scores  which  are     submitted  to  the  Head  of Department depending on the institution’s policy guiding result submission and computation.   After   collation,   the   results   are   then   handed   over   to   the examination officer or submitted to a central office with the responsibility of computing results. The questions that come to mind are; how secured are the data? How often will the data storage capacity be increased to enable it meet the increasing demand of the data? How is the integrity of the data maintained? What  is  the  cost  of  providing  and  maintaining  the  required  storage  and computing resources? How available or accessible are the data?.

Mostly, these records are manually processed by collating individual candidate’s results and computed by the designated officer(s) before results are being produced. The above named processes are faced with the following challenges:

•           Time wasting: A proper evaluation of the manual system of result computation  shows  that  lots  of  time  is  being  wasted  during  the processes involved in computation of results. These includes the time wasted awaiting result submission from individual lecturers, manual computation of individual student’s result, time wasting due to system break down, correction of errors, having to wait for a system expert to solve trivial problems that basic knowledge of computer would have solved, etc.

•           Data   Inconsistency:    Following    the       processes    involved    in computation  of result, the possibility of errors cannot be ruled out since a lot of persons are involved in the computation processes. Thus, the consistency of the result,  is therefore not guaranteed.

•           High Cost of Ownership: There is a realization in Nigeria that the government alone cannot adequately shoulder the high cost of quality education  in  the  21st  century.  Partnership  between  government, industry  and  stakeholders  appears  to  be  the  preferred  option.  In Nigeria, a number of organizations for example, Education Trust Fund (ETF), Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), National Information  Technology Development  Agency (NITDA) etc donate ICT   laboratories    equipped    with   computers    to   some   tertiary institutions.   In   addition   they   pay   for   one   year   or   two   years maintenance fee and mandate the recipient institution to sustain the facility.  Most  of  these  laudable  efforts  have  failed  because  the recipients were unable to pay for the high cost of system maintenance and system upgrade. This is because the cost of ICT Infrastructure in Nigeria consist of not only capital cost but also high operating cost. Thus the cost of ownership is very high.

•           De-centralization:     Currently,     some     Universities     do     result computation manually or electronically on standalone systems i.e. individual  departmental  result    resides  on  different  computers  or devices. Therefore, the security of such result cannot be guaranteed i.e. the decentralization of results makes it difficult to protect the data from illegal usage or unforeseen data loss. Thus, it is the investigation of the above problems and providing solutions that this research work is based on.

1.3 Objective of the Study

The objectives of this research work are to develop a system that should be able:

i         to compute result in cloud environment.

ii.       to provide  a  4-level  security system  for  maintaining  the  security and integrity of result computation in cloud computing environment.

1.4     Scope of the Study

The scope of this work is to develop a cloud based software which will be deployed using a private cloud deployment model. This application will majorly be used for the computation of result in Nigerian universities with strictly adherence to the application security by proposing a four-level user authentication.

1.5     Limitation of the Study

There are numbers of limitation that are to be noted in this research work:

i. The infrastructures  used is this research work is an abstract model of the proposed data centre used in the work, this is due to insufficient fund to set up the real scenario of the proposed model .

ii. Cloud  computing  is an emerging  computing  paradigm  that is yet to be embraced in this part of the globe and therefore made it difficult to source for research materials needed for this work.

1.6     Significance of the study

The study will provide the Nigerian Universities with a reliable and secured environment  for result computation  which is fast, effective and efficient for result processing and management with little or no concern to the storage and computing resources (speed, storage capacity, etc.). Most importantly, the study will also foster the reduction of  the huge financial budget invested into IT on Nigerian Universities. Also, the time wasted in the result computation processes will be largely reduced thereby propelling institutional development. Over  the  years,  nigerian  universities  have  been  computing  results  manually which usually results into large volume of paper usage, not only that the papers degradate over the years but also a lot of valuable storage spaces are being used for the safe keeping. Thus, this research work is geared at solving the storage problems and also to foster future usage and accessiblity of records amongst others.  The adoption  of   cloud  technology  with  the peculiarity  of it’s price models would help to reduce the stained educational budget for running ICT projects in the nigerian universities, this could also serve asan optimun solutions to other ICT needs within the university and could also foster content sharing, collaboration and research within local and internationl universities.

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