Disguised public key for anonymity and enforced confidentiality in summative e-examinations

Abstract

The two crucial assets of summative examination are question paper and the answers-scripts. Maintenance of secrecy of question paper/answers-scripts within its defined perimeters is extremely important to protect the sanctity and fairness of the summative examination. In addition to the secrecy of question paper/answers-scripts, anonymity between students and examiners is also equally important for ensuring an unbiased evaluation. Anonymity and secrecy is required in an examination environment to prevent the student and any other entity from coercing with each other and indulging in unfair means. It appears that, establishing secrecy of answers-scripts from examination authority is a bit tricky task as examination authority itself needs to receive the answers-scripts submitted by students for forwarding it to the examiners for evaluation. In this paper, we propose a dual purpose cryptographic scheme for achieving anonymity of students and examiners from each other besides the secrecy of answers-scripts from recipient examination authority, which we refer to as enforced confidentiality. We intend to achieve anonymity and enforced confidentiality by disguising the public key (public key cryptosystem) of the final recipient entity from the sender of the information based on the concept of blind signature scheme. The proposed mechanism is suitable for achieving anonymity and enforced confidentiality in applications where communication between the sender and the recipient needs to be carried through the intermediate entity.