AUTOMATED AND PRIVACY PRESERVING E-ATTENDANCE SYSTEM BY USING BEACON FRAME ACTIVE SCANNING TECHNOLOGIES AND LIGHTWEIGHT DATA ENCRYPTION

Abstract

The regularity of student’s attendance is critical in the administration of higher Educational Institutions. Recently, the electronic attendance (e-attendance) system has been developed to assist in detecting of poor attendance. However, these E-Attendance systems are mainly constructed by using QR code technologies, i.e., Smart-Hadir e attendance system in UMS. Several limitations were detected during the implementation of QR-based E-attendance system, includes (i) Fraudulence Scanning by the absent student; (ii) Camera condition and Lighting interference; (iii) inadequate to support active monitoring; (iv) Unauthorized access to redirected link; (iv) Lack of privacy protection for student data in E-Attendance system. To address this problem, this project aims to propose an Automated and Privacy Preserving E-Attendance System By using Beacon Frame Active Scanning Technologies and Lightweight Data Encryption. The use of beacon frame is its capability of advertising beacon signal by access point to search for nearby user devices before allowing them to join the network. This packet comprised of essential information of the device such as its MAC address, SSID etc. that can be utilized as unique fingerprint. To preserve data privacy, this project embeds the lightweight data encryption algorithm in securing low-end to high-end devices with almost negligible performance tradeoff when generating key to be exchanged with communicating entity (lecturer) as to ensure originality of the sent MAC address. The project will be utilizing an iterative method that consists of five phases such as requirement planning, analysis and design, development, testing and evaluation phase. The expected outcome of this project is delivering an automated and Privacy-Preserving E-Attendance System, which can serve as an alternative solution to address the current limitation of the QR-based E-attendance system.