Abstract
Allowing students to use their own devices for electronic assessments allows institutions of higher education to reduce their expenses for specialized computer labs. There are, however, concerns about the security of these kind of examinations if the devices are not fully controlled by the examining institution. In addition to these concerns, several other issues have to be taken into account for electronic assessment: equality of treatment, student identification and proof of authorship need to be ensured by an electronic assessment software framework. In this paper, we present our approach to such a framework. Using a client-server model, the proposed assessment framework meets the previously mentioned issues by establishing a trusted platform on students’ devices and uses digital signatures and asymmetric encryption to identify the students. A remote attestation protocol allows on-line verification of the integrity of the software platform on the students’ devices during an assessment. Therefore, our framework, thus provides the means to conduct practically secure electronic examinations.
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Notes
- 1.
This may also be the reason why there is to our knowledge no lockdown software for Linux systems.
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Küppers, B., Politze, M., Zameitat, R., Kerber, F., Schroeder, U. (2019). Practical Security for Electronic Examinations on Students’ Devices. In: Arai, K., Kapoor, S., Bhatia, R. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 857. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01177-2_21
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