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IT Infrastructure and Security (COSC2737)

Assignment 2 (S1 2022)

Instructions:
• This is a group assignment that contributes 45% to your overall course marks.
o Preferably, groups will have a maximum of 3 members; However, students can work in a
group of 2 members, or as an individual if you prefer.
o Higher level standard applies to groups with more than 3 members.
• The tasks include Report (25%), Practice (15%), and Presentation (5%).
• Report and Practice due at 29th May 2022. Presentation at weeks 11-12 workshop sessions.
• Students in a group need to sign a contribution agreement to acknowledge each member’s
percentage of contribution in the work. The contribution agreement must be signed by all group
members, scanned, and included in your submission.


Report: Secure management tasks include (25%):
Your group is required to use the given template, follow STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) model
to write a technical report, which aligns with your chosen Practice (either option A or Option B). include:
1. An appropriate title for your essay (1 mark)
2. Have a clear structure and organise the content logically (3 marks)
3. The explanations on the technical details of IT system infrastructure (12 marks)
• Pick up at least three components of IT infrastructure;
• Elaborate on how each individual components are connected;
• Explain what should be done to make it "secure";
4. How the system handles integrity and confidentiality; (5 marks)
5. Security issues identified and the possible improvements. (3 marks)
6. Using the given template and cite more than 10 references; and at least 5 of them must be
academic publications in recent 5 years. (1 marks)

Practice (15%):
Each group chooses either Option A or Option B for the practice task.
Option A. Development of a Secure IT System Gateway, tasks include:
1. Key pair generation for a user (2 marks)
2. User registration interface, and keep the username and hashed password in database (3 marks)
3. User login to the website with the credentials used for registration; (3 marks)
4. Secure session management (3 marks)
5. Your website must have a high quality client interface with decent layout and appearance,
friendly user interface with rich interactive functions and visualizations. (4 marks)

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Option B. AWS Analysis (15%):

1. How the public key cryptographic system is used in Amazon S3 service? (2 marks)
2. Explain how to use AWS to host static content and dynamic content of a website. Give
examples to justify your answer. (2 marks)
3. Discuss the solutions AWS can provide to distribute incoming application traffic across
multiple targets and virtual appliances in one or more Availability Zones. How multiple
clients are handled in the virtual Amazon EC2 environment. Include examples to justify your
answer. (2 marks)
4. In reference to our candidate pools data shown in Canvas, describe how you would design and
create a database using AWS to keep information about candidates, including indexing to
make it faster to search on criteria such as candidate name, qualification, domain knowledge...
Describe how the database can be connected to a web application with a front-end user
interface to display the data and allow users to search. (4 marks)
5. Write a user manual showing a complete process of hosting a website on AWS. You can use
the candidate pool on Canvas as the database. In your answer, you need to describe each AWS
components that you use and justify the reason to use them, the advantages and any limitations
of each component. You need to include a diagram to show how the components are linked
together. You also need to draw a database design diagram with detailed explanation about the
tables, the keys, the constraints on each database column and index. You need to include
screenshots showing the steps and some data examples about how you create such a database
and add data to the tables in the database on AWS. (5 marks)




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