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      • HARVEST
      • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
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      USING BLOCKCHAIN TO BUILD DECENTRALIZED ACCESS CONTROL IN A PEER-TO-PEER E-LEARNING PLATFORM

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      MA-THESIS-2018.pdf (2.064Mb)
      Date
      2018-02-06
      Author
      Ma, Sihua 1989-
      ORCID
      0000-0003-0592-7588
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Masters
      Metadata
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      Abstract
      In the context of E-learning platforms, the amount of research focusing on access control is proliferating. However, research related to the decentralized access control in this field is scarce. To improve such area of research, an innovative model of decentralized access control used to protect the collaborative peer-to-peer E-learning platform has been proposed. In this model, the integrity, authenticity, non-repudiation and traceability of E-learning resources are ensured by using Blockchain platform. Also, RESTful web service and Go/Java programming language will be used as tools to implement this model. A key metric is measured to evaluate the proposed model: average response time. To increase the accuracy, some experiments (144) have been carried out. The same experiment is conducted in two comparatively different network environment: Local Area Network (LAN) and Cloud Web Service (such as Amazon Web Service). LAN running environment represents the optimal condition while Cloud environment stands for the actual condition in the real world. When the number of clients in my proposed E-learning platform is relatively small (consisting of one to thirty concurrent clients interacting with E-learning resources), the average response time in the LAN environment is much faster (nearly 1.5 times) than that in Cloud environment. Nevertheless, when the number of clients is on a large scale, the difference of average response time between this two environment becomes insignificant. Besides, adding servers in both environments can increase the horizontal scalability. Furthermore, adding servers in Cloud environment can boost the system performance dramatically. However, extending the delay could have an impact on the system performance but negligible.
      Degree
      Master of Science (M.Sc.)
      Department
      Computer Science
      Program
      Computer Science
      Supervisor
      Deters, Ralph
      Committee
      Greer, Jim; Vassileva, Julita; Chen, Li
      Copyright Date
      February 2018
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/8401
      Subject
      E-learning
      Access control
      Blockchain
      RESTful Web Services
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