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Rezwana Reaz

Publications and source records attributed to Rezwana Reaz.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

ParikkhaChain: Blockchain-Based Result Processing and Privacy-Preserving Academic Record Management for the Complete Examination Lifecycle

Academic examination systems worldwide continue to rely on centralised, opaque record-keeping that is often vulnerable to credential forgery, result tampering, examiner bias, and the absence of transparent re-evaluation pathways. Existing blockchain-based approaches in education focus predominantly on post-hoc certificate storage or online-only examination portals, leaving the complete onsite examination lifecycle, from conducting exams through scrutiny, largely unaddressed. This paper proposes ParikkhaChain, a blockchain-based framework that covers the entire examination lifecycle of an onsite examination system with three distinguishing contributions: (i) anonymous script evaluation through cryptographic hashing of answer scripts before examiner access, thereby eliminating identity-based bias; (ii) a transparent evaluation and scrutiny workflow backed by an immutable on-chain audit trail that records every mark submission and grade revision; and (iii) inclusion of privacy-preserving verification using zero-knowledge proofs and off-chain storage mechanisms. The system is architected around four Solidity smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. The proposed architecture is the first initiative to our knowledge to support physical examination process, anonymous marking, and re-evaluation transparency. We successfully simulate full exam cycles of an onsite exam to grade-sheet generation using a working prototype on a large scale of 100 courses and hundreds of teachers and students. The experimental results show that the system can manage online examinations of hundreds of courses, students and faculties efficiently with great throughput, low storage, and transaction cost. Our codebase is available in open source form at https://github.com/AhmedRumi/CSE6608-ParikkhaChain

cs.CR

DEFT: Distributed, Elastic, and Fault-tolerant State Management of Network Functions

Network function virtualization is the key to developing elastically scalable and fault-tolerant network functions (e.g. load balancer, firewall etc.). By integrating NFV and SDN technologies, it is feasible to dynamically reroute traffic to new network function (NF) instances in the event of an NF failure or overload scenario. The fact that the majority of network functions are stateful makes the task more challenging. State migration and state replication are common approaches in achieving elasticity and fault tolerance. The majority of the studies in the literature either emphasize fault tolerance or elastic scalability while designing a state management system for network functions. In this paper, we have designed a complete state management system, called DEFT, that meets both elasticity and fault-tolerance goals. Our system also supports strong consistency on global state updates. While existing designs rely on a central controller or remote central storage to achieve strong consistency on state updates, DEFT utilizes distributed consensus mechanism to achieve the same. We have done a proof of concept implementation of DEFT and extensively tested DEFT under several model conditions to evaluate its scalability and performance. Our experimental results show that DEFT is scalable and maintains a considerably high throughput throughout. It incurs minimal performance overhead while achieving strong consistency on state updates.

cs.DC

Linear Time Inference of Strings from Cover Arrays using a Binary Alphabet

Covers being one of the most popular form of regularities in strings, have drawn much attention over time. In this paper, we focus on the problem of linear time inference of strings from cover arrays using the least sized alphabet possible. We present an algorithm that can reconstruct a string $x$ over a two-letter alphabet whenever a valid cover array $C$ is given as an input. This algorithm uses several interesting combinatorial properties of cover arrays and an interesting relation between border array and cover array to achieve this. Our algorithm runs in linear time.

cs.DS