DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF ONLINE AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM

CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Authentication is an activity to validate the person credential that wishes to perform an activity. In the process of authentication, the password entered by the user will be transmitted along the traffic to the authentication server in order to allow the server to grant access to the authorized user. When the password is transmitted, the attackers will try to sniff into the network to obtain data that include the user's password. Currently, there is rainbow table which is able to trace password with the hash algorithm to obtain the user's password. Once the password is succeeded to be decrypted, the attackers can use the user credential to do something illegal such as fraud, which will affect the user credibility in the system.
According to Pagliery (2014), 47% of the American adults account have been hacked and their personal information exposed by the hackers. Due to the existing challenge, many people no longer trust that password will be able to protect their online account. According to Sulleyman (2017), some of the attackers will sell the email account that is been hacked to others to gain profit.
It is important to protect our own account because our credential is priceless. It is hard to trace the attackers in the cyber world. The secure login do not system is needed to ensure the cyber space safety. Therefore, this project would like to provide alternative ways to log in to a system because current login provide strong credentials as most people today do not use strong credentials.
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Authentication is an activity to authenticate the person credential that wishes to perform the activity. If the credential is matched, the process is completed and the user will be granted access. Generally, the user will need to provide their password to begin using a service of the system. According to Rouse (2014), user authentication authorizes human-to-machine interactions in operating systems and applications as well as both wired and wireless networks to enable access to network and Internet connected systems, applications and resources.
In their investigation of password evolution, Bonneau (2015) state that the password is added to the sharing operating system in 1960s. However, the problem arose very quick due to the leakage of the unencrypted password master file. When reaching 1970s, the password started to be stored in the hashed form. In 1979, the hashed password was improved with the salting. With the mid-1990s introduction of the World Wide Web, the password is secure using the public-key cryptography via secure sockets layer (SSL) client certificates. The password then uses to link to the email. Two-factor authentication is introduced, in the early 2010s, when smartphone was widely used. The reason for the implementation is also because of the free smartphone applications to act as a second factor based on the emerging time-based-onetime-pad (TOTP) standard. TOTP is an algorithm that computes a one-time password from a shared secret key and the current time. There are also services provided by sending codes via short message service (SMS) as a backup authentication mechanism.
In their investigation of password evolution, Denso (2016) state that Quick Response (QR) code was created in 1994 in Japan. It is named after quick response because of the high-speed reading. QR code is an evolution of the barcodes. The evolution occurs due to the limitation of the barcodes which only can hold 20 alphanumeric characters.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Authentication relies on precise recall of the secret information. If the user makes a small error in entering the secret key information, the authentication fails. Unfortunately, precise recall is not a strong point of human cognition. As a result making malicious user intrude primary data of personal system or account on the internet.
1.3 AIM AND OBJECTIVES
Aim
The aim of this project is to identify an individual process or entity that is attempting to log in to a domain or system.
Objectives
1. The main objective is to implement a secure login authentication system by using two-factor authentications.
2. To ensure that login password will not be transmitted over the network.
3. To generate the one time password offline.
4. To ensure the system is protected from rainbow attack.
1.4 JUSTIFICATION OF THE STUDY
This project plays a vital role in encrypting user data versus any other intruder who is able to decode user’s password, because even if someone knows your password, he will not get access to your dashboard until he use the OTP that is sent to you in your email.
1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The scope of this research focuses only on how to authenticate a user.
The system is designed such that only authorized user can have access to the system or public domain, thereby verifying each attempt to have access to a particular system on the network.
1.6 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY
Authentication as whole is a reliable and effective system for blocking unauthorized access. It still has some downside which include: increased login time. Users must go through an extra step to login into an application, adding time to the login process. However this work aim to prevent unauthorized user from accessing secured data.

1.7 RESOURCES AND TECHNOLOGIES USED
1. HTML
2. CSS
3. JAVASCRIFT
4. BOOTSTRAP
5. PHP
6. XAMPP

1.8 DEFINITION OF TERMS
• TOTP:- Time based-onetime-pad
• SMS:- Short message service
• SSL:- Secure sockets layer
• HTML:- Hypertext markup language. The language for building the skeleton of a website or web application.
• CSS:– Cascading style sheet. It is used for changing the view of the contents of the web page by applying specific or general styles to these contents (CSS Cheat 2021).
• Bootstrap:- is a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It contains CSS- and JavaScript-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation, and other interface components.
• JavaScript:- often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that conforms to the ECMAScript specification. JavaScript is high-level, often just-in-time compiled and multi-paradigm. It has dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation and first-class functions.
• PHP:- Stand for “Hypertext Preprocessor”. (It is a recursive acronym, if you can understand what that means.) PHP is an HTML-embedded Web scripting language (PHP Programming cookbook n.d.).
• XAMPP:- is a free open-source cross-platform web server solution stack package developed by apache Friends, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP server, MariDB database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages (XAMPP 2020).
1.9 CHAPTERIZATION
This project is made up of five chapters and the contents of each chapter are listed.
Chapter one
i. Introduction
ii. Background of the study
iii. Statement of the problem
iv. Justification of the study
v. Aim and objectives
vi. Scope of the study
vii. Limitation of the study
viii. Resources and the technologies used
ix. Definitions of terms
x. Chapterization
Chapter Two
This chapter includes Literature Review which contains the following.
i. Theoretical concept and
ii. Review of Related Literatures (Existing System)
Chapter Three
Design and Methodology: this chapter describes the methodology of the work done in the following order.
i. Introduction
ii. Preliminary investigation
iii. Feasibility study
iv. Overview of the Existing system
v. Analysis of the Existing system
vi. Overview of the propose system
vii. Analysis of the propose system
viii. System design.
Chapter four
System implementation and testing; This chapter present the result and the interpretation of analysis of data collected, observation made on information gathered. This chapter consist of the following parts.
i. Introduction
ii. System implementation
iii. System testing
Chapter Five
This chapter contains the following.
i. Summary
ii. Conclusion
iii. Recommendation
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 EXISTING PROPOSED SOLUTIONS OVERVIEW
Authentication is a process to access or login to account in order to access the services provided by the system or server using the password. It also has an alternative way to authenticate the user which is using biometric authentication by using fingerprint or iris recognition. However, human has the tendency to create easy to remember password which will lead to a problem.
By definition, authentication is the use of one or more mechanisms to confirm that you are the authorized user. Once the identity of the human or machine is validated, access is granted. There are existing acknowledged three authentication factors such as things the user know, things the user have and biometric authentication. Biometric-based authentication is a good way to authenticate the user but it is expensive and raises some privacy concern.
One Time Passwords (OTP) offers a promising alternative for two-factor authentication systems. A one-time password is a password that is valid for only one login session or transaction, on a computer system or other digital device (Cheng, et al. ,2005).
Two-factor authentication solution equips customers with a cost effective means of providing flexible and strong authentication to a very large scale. The goal of computer security to maintain the integrity, availability and privacy of the information entrusted to the system can be obtained by adopting this authentication technique.
There are also some company that uses the hashing algorithm to store their password. In the transmission of the password, the password has already been hashed and become unreadable.
Lastly, most of the password is now encrypted when it is sent from the sender to the receiver. The password is encrypted so that the attackers will not easily obtain the correct password since they will need another step to decrypt the data (Mathur,2012).

    Date: 2026-08-05 00:00:00.000000