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Goggs

The new-gen ID cards.

The problem Goggs solves

  1. Wearing the traditional I-card at all times is a compulsion
    in college but it becomes pretty difficult to carry it at all times. Breaking of lanyard, teacher's scolding, deduction of disciplinary marks and what not!

  2. Hostels usually have a biometric system but that isn't a feasible option during the current pandemic situation. Alternative to this is our traditional paper pen mode which wastes time and can be tiresome.

  3. Mess staff needs the count of total no. of people who entered the mess. The traditional counter machine is highly inaccurate and also wastes time, processing each count.

  4. Mess staff can't keep the record if someone is repeating their meal. This leads to their loss.

  5. With so many shops creating I-cards, it is pretty easy to create fake I-cards. This causes security breaches and proves the current system to be highly incompetent.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Security breach was our main concern!
    What if somebody else scans somebody else's QR?
    What if somebody malfunctions the QR ID?
    How to find if somebody tries to enter the mess more than once in a particular session (morning, afternoon, night).
    We had these questions in our mind while designing our application, so after discussing for a while we came up with the answers to the asked questions. And they were,
    a. On scanning, student details will be shown on the admin screen, so that the authority scanning the QRs, can themselves physically verify if the shown image matches with the student or not.
    b. JWT (JSON Web Token), we stored student details as the payload and signed with a 256-bit secret keyword. Leaving no room for malfunctioning.
    c. Every student will have 3 falses at the start of the day (one for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner), whenever he/she enters the mess successfully, one of those false will turn to true, depending on the session. So that he/she can have their meal only once at a particular time of day. On the next day, at 12.00 A.M. the server will automatically refresh your counts for the day with 3 falses again.

  2. To develop a scanner, which on scanning the QR code shows student details encrypted inside the JWT, which was not possible using our normal QR scanners, as they would have only shown the JWT ( of which we made the QRs).
    But after spending a good amount of time on research, we agreed on the idea that in spite of displaying the encrypted code on scanning, we will send the encrypted code to the server, and check if the provided JWT passes all checks or not, and if it does then the server respond to the client request with respective student information in a generalized form.

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