EduNexus: A Secure and Scalable MERN-Based Educational Eco- system with Integrated Payment Authentication
Diya Patil
Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
New Horizon Institute of Technology and Management
Mumbai, India
diyapatil226@nhitm.ac.in
Shravani Patane
Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
New Horizon Institute of Technology and Management
Mumbai, India shravanipatane226@nhitm.ac.in
Yash Vadke
Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
New Horizon Institute of Technology and Management
Mumbai, India yashvadke226@nhitm.ac.in
Abstract— Educational platforms are usually spread across systems for delivering courses, managing hackathons, listing internships and processing payments. These systems often don't have security and strong ways to check transactions. This paper talks about EduN- exus, a scalable educational ecosystem built using the MERN stack, which includes MongoDB, Express.js, React.js and Node.js. EduN- exus brings together student and admin login systems with role-based access control to ensure system management is controlled. Login is done using JSON Web Tokens and RESTful APIs make backend communication structured. Financial transactions are secure through Razorpay integration [16] with HMAC-SHA256, signature verification on the server-side to prevent payment tampering and unauthor- ized confirmations. The platform allows for course enrollment, registration, browsing internships, managing content and interacting with a chatbot in one unified system. Security considerations include handling credentials role-based authorization protecting API routes and managing secrets based on the environment. Tests show that the system has fast/optimal API response times, reliable payment validation secure multi-role authentication and stable performance under moderate concurrent usage. EduNexus offers an extensible and security-focused foundation, for future educational platforms.
Index Terms— MERN Stack, Educational Platform, Secure Payment Gateway, REST API Architecture, HMAC Verification
