A school maintains a database of students' details and teaching resources on a central server. This data can be accessed by all teachers in the school.

Method #1

${latex}$\bullet$ Data masking or data obfuscation 1 mark

• is the process of hiding original data with random characters 1 mark
• e.g.: suppressing certain characters in the student address, student id etc. 1 mark

Method #2

${latex}$\bullet$ Data encryption 1 mark

• Conversion of data into non-readable gibberish creates highly secure results such as scrambling the student_ID 1 mark
• The only way to gain access to the data is to unlock it with a key or password which only those authorized can access 1 mark

Method #1

Data masking or data obfuscation:

• Is the process of hiding original data with random characters 1 mark
• Example: suppressing certain characters in the student address, student ID, etc. 1 mark

Data encryption:

• Conversion of data into non-readable gibberish creates highly secure results such as scrambling the student ID 1 mark
• The only way to gain access to the data is to unlock it with a key or password which only those authorized can access 1 mark

Maximum 3 marks

Explain how concurrent use of the school database is possible in this situation:

• The ability of a database to allow multiple teachers to affect multiple transactions 1 mark
• Allowing concurrent processing while ensuring transaction isolation 1 mark
• Thus, ensuring the update of one teacher does not affect the update of another teacher 1 mark
• While one transaction (by a teacher) is accessing a resource from a shared folder, it places a lock, an access restriction, on the resource, controlling the level of access allowed by another transaction by another teacher A1

3

Way 1

Minimizing permissions: 1 mark Restrict users to have permission only to the means to do their job. Some can view, modify and insert, while some can only view etc. 1 mark

Way 2

Auditing changes: 1 mark Log changes made to teachers and permissions through auditing. This gives a trail to follow should you have problems. Without authorization, no one gets grant of permissions. 1 mark

Award [4 max] Award [1] for identifying a way of maintaining data security and [1] for a development up to [2 max] Mark as [2] and [2]