A lowest price query system and its security issues

• Main Author: Chew, Daryl Jin Hong.
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Mathematics of computing::Probability and statistics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48461
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A Lowest-Price Query (LPQ) system that allowed users to query from their mobile phone the lowest price of certain articles, and populated its database through contributing users inputting prices for articles they had bought had encountered a security issue that needed to be resolved before the system can be put into practice. The system was heavily reliant on the contributing users’ integrity for the data input in its system database. This opened the system to potential attacks from contributing users with malicious intents. These users may enter fake data into the system in an attempt to cripple it. The system needed a method of verifying whether the input contributed by users are valid or invalid before allowing it to be entered into the system to ensure that the system database maintain only factual data. The project had taken the prediction approach towards resolving this problem. By making predictions of the ranges of valid values, an input could be filtered by whether if it falls into the range of valid values. The completed project had created a prediction module for the approach and produced intuitively reasonable results. The LPQ system could use these results to decide if an input was valid or invalid and solve the existing security issue.