Design and Implementation of an Enhanced QR-Code Based Attendance System

Abstract

Attendance systems in our educational systems today are employed by management and other concerned authorities to take records of students’ presence as well as participation, especially in crucial school activities and events. Traditional attendance methods involving manual roll calls and sign-in sheets have been used for quite a long time leading to issues related to time and errors. Several digital attendance systems incorporating QR-code-based authentication mechanisms have been proposed, yet few identified challenges such as cost, security and user friendliness are yet to be fully considered. This paper presents an improvement on the QR-code attendance framework leveraging User-Centric Approach (UCA). Data was aggregated from students and lecturers to generate the QR Code followed by identity authentication protocols utilizing email credentials and encrypted passwords. Session information, such as timestamp and number of participating students, were also recorded accordingly and stored in the system's database. Each QR code was integrated with cryptographic timestamping, enforcing temporal validity constraints to invalidate it after a five-second interval for security optimization. This was implemented using JavaScript programming logic. The QR Code Attendance System had a high engagement with 7,900 unique scans over seven weeks and consistent daily usage. It processed approximately 105,000 reads, indicating robust system performance and underscoring the need for cost-efficient database management. This represents an improvement over the conventional QR-based methods. The introduction of additional features such as the expiration of QR codes and disabling of screenshots to enhance security serve as improvements on existing systems, thus, eliminating critical weakness in terms of usability and security against unauthorized attendance registration by sharing codes or reusing them.