Secure Logger

Overview

A secure log, to describe the state of an institute: the guests and employees who have entered and left, and persons that are in campus in different buildings or rooms, is implemented in this project. The log will be used by two programs. One program, logappend, will append new information to this file, and the other, logread, will read from the file and display the state of the institute according to a given query over the log. Both programs will use an authentication token, supplied as a command-line argument, to authenticate each other. Specifications for these two programs are described in more detail here: logappend and logread.

All the source files and Makefile are located in the build directory. After building, the executables logappend and logread will be created within the build directory.

The project uses the libsodium library for cryptographic operations and nlohmann-json for JSON parsing.

Programs

• The logappend program appends data to a log
• The logread program reads and queries data from the log

Prerequisites

This project requires:

1. libsodium - for cryptographic functions.
2. nlohmann-json - for JSON parsing.

Installing libsodium and nlohmann-json

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libsodium-dev
sudo apt install nlohmann-json3-dev

If you are a root user omit sudo from above commands.

Mac

brew install libsodium
brew install nlohmann-json

Windows

For this project, we recommend setting up the required libraries (libsodium and nlohmann-json) using MSYS2 due to its simplicity of setup:

• Ensure that MSYS2 is installed on your system.

• Open the MSYS2 terminal and run:

  pacman -Syu

• Install libsodium:

  pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-libsodium

• Install nlohmann-json:

  pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-nlohmann-json

• Compilation Instructions: To compile the project (before running make), ensure the correct include and library paths are specified for your compiler. The following flags are used:

  • Include Path (-I): Specifies the directory for header files required by the project. (For exapmle, "C:/msys64/mingw64/include" for MinGW64)
  • Library Path (-L): Specifies the directory containing the necessary libraries. (For example, "C:/msys64/mingw64/lib" for MinGW64)

Building the Project

To build the project, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/Shr-Agr/Secure_Logger.git

2. Navigate to the build directory:

cd Secure_Logger
cd build

3. Run make to compile the executables:

make

This will create two executable files in the build directory:

logappend logread

Running the Programs

After building the project, you can run the executables from the build directory.

Running logappend

./logappend [options]

Running logread

./logread [options]

Details about [options] is provided here: logappend and logread.