Secure Online Judge in Cloud Environment

Cloud Computing is a rapidly developing technology in the IT Sector. It provides an on demand service to its users using the Internet. It provides the users with the resources as per their demand and also enables the users to pay as per their usage of resources. The users can access the cloud anytime using the Internet. Such features eliminate the requirement of carrying documentation for the users as the cloud can be accessed globally and remotely by the user. But, this introduces the possibility of security breaches or intruder attacks while the user interacts with the cloud database. In this paper, some of the security concerns while using a Cloud based Online Judge will be addressed using new approaches. An Online Judge is a system which takes a code, compiles it, checks for compilation errors, and executes the code by giving it some hidden inputs and capturing the output produced after it. It checks for runtime errors and finally matches the output with the expected output from the solution. The Online Judge system is very important for grading of coding assignments and for programming contests as it can include the constraints on the solutions for source code limit and various resources such as time and space requirements. It also removes the subjective nature in the grading system of coding assignments. The Online judge faces various security issues at authorization level and access rights of users. There is also possibility of a user running a malicious code on the judge thus harming the server or other resources. In this paper we address such issues.