Implementation of a Secured Data Communication between Heterogeneous Systems using Web Services Case Study: Kumasi Polytechnic

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JUNE 2016
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Web services are believed to be the future of distributed applications since they access a little resource from the host machine to operate. Though many developers have bought into this idea, the development of web services still needs a wide implementation and deployment (Du , 2004). Organizations are still finding it difficult to grasp its make up and deployment. Many organizations, still depend on partners infrastructure for data processing and its transfer. For example with respect to our case study (Kumasi Polytechnic), school fees data of students takes a long time before the institution acknowledges receipt. This is due to the fact that the banking institution involved has to do some internal reconciliations. In actuality this reconciliations do not benefit the institution but they bare its consequence in the area of student registrations. In transferring or sending real time data, web service developers claim web services are the smartest way (Du , 2004), but customers would want to know whether it is really what it is meant to be. Its performance coupled with high security is very key to the customers who would want to implement such services. In this case web service providers need a well tested framework before the actual commercialization of the web services. For the past years, the Kumasi Polytechnic Institute had had many challenges with the the real time access to school fees data for other process. Transactions sent over raw the hyper text transfer protocol(http) are susceptible to common attacks such as the man-in-the-middle attack. When this attack occurs, the attacker will be able to retrieve important messages from the http request and later use it against the real person the message was meant for. This is a main problem of raw http. In this thesis, we showcase a secured way of transferring highly sensitive data through Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) by implementing two kinds of security levels i.e. the Secure Socket Layer and the a single key data encryption algorithm. The results proved that encrypting data over the internet and also encrypting the transfer protocol has no significant effect of the data that iii is transfered
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A Thesis submitted to Department of Computer Science Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master Of Philosophy: Information Technology Institute of Distance Learning (IDL) June 2016
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