A Practical Online Score Reporting with an Excel File in a Privacy Preserving Way

Abstract

Abstract. The importance of privacy cannot be emphasized too much. That is true even for reporting exam scores or sending individual comments in the school. Any sensitive data including students" exam scores should be kept confidentially and protected from any kinds of attacks against privacy. If the online management system is well-equipped and securely managed in the school, then it is easy to distribute individual reports. However, such a system costs high and does not support flexible and dedicated formats designed for each purpose. In this paper, we propose a practical way for an instructor to post students" individual exam scores in a single file. By implementing a cryptographic hash function together with score data in an MS Excel file, we demonstrate a score report from which allows each student to retrieve his/her score in a privacy preserving way based on the password. Since our worksheet runs cryptographic operations with only built-in functions of Excel, it is easy for instructors to write their own score reports based on ours without relying on any management systems. Also, it is cryptographically as secure as underlying hash function SHA-256.