Enhancing System Security Using Cryptographic Algorithms for Student Attendance Management

Abstract

Student attendance records are essential for academic administration, performance monitoring, and institutional decision-making. However, conventional digital attendance systems remain vulnerable to unauthorized access, data tampering, replay attacks, and information leakage, which may compromise the confidentiality and integrity of attendance data. This study proposes a hybrid cryptographic framework for securing student attendance management systems by integrating AES-256 for data encryption, RSA-2048 for secure session key exchange and authentication, and SHA-256 for integrity verification. The proposed framework protects attendance records throughout the entire data lifecycle, including data collection, transmission, storage, and retrieval. Experimental evaluation was conducted using simulated attendance datasets ranging from 100 to 10,000 records to assess encryption time, decryption time, computational overhead, and security effectiveness. The results indicate that the proposed framework maintains efficient computational performance while significantly enhancing confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and resistance to unauthorized access, replay attacks, data tampering, and man-in-the-middle attacks compared with conventional single-algorithm approaches. These findings demonstrate that the proposed hybrid cryptographic framework provides a reliable, scalable, and practical security solution for modern student attendance management systems. Keywords- Student Attendance Management, AES-256, RSA-2048, SHA-256, Hybrid Cryptography