Uma arquitetura de segurança para ambientes de educação a distância

Abstract

Distance Education (DE) is a very important theme that has been discussed intensively owing to the growing demand for continued education and to the modernization and availability of new technologies. Several DE environments have emerged as a result of the increasing popularity of the Internet, each offering a variety of resources, mainly to maximize the teaching/learning process. Due to its relevance to the DE theory, this process has been the focus of several researches aimed at developing this type of environment. As a result, designers and developers have devoted little attention to subjects not directly related to it. The purpose of this work, therefore, is precisely to broach on of these subjects, in the form of a safety architecture for DE environments that takes into account the aspects of authentication and control of user access. From the standpoint of authentication, the architecture employs the password and random question mechanisms coded using cryptographic keys. With regard to access control, the scheme formulated for the architecture combines a series of techniques that allow the manager of course in a DE environment the maximum flexibility and simplicity in managing the authorizations attributed to the users registered in the course. These techniques involve the use of collective/individual authorizations, positive/negative authorizations, and explicit/implicit authorizations.