A FRAMEWORK OF SECURE BIOMETRIC BASED ONLINE EXAM AUTHENTICATION: AN ALTERNATIVE TO TRADITIONAL EXAM
T. Ramu, T. Arivoli · 2013
In the past fifteen years the use of Internet technologies has been substantially growing for delivery of educational content and online learn- ing has become increasingly popular and evolved. Online examination is an integral and vital component of online learning. Student assessment in online learning is largely submitted remotely without any face-to-face interaction and therefore, student authentication is widely seen as one of the major challenges in online examination. This study aims to investigate potential threats to student authentication in the online examinations and analyzing the benefits and limitations of the existing authentication approaches. Online examinations pose a unique problem, in that it can be very difficult to provide true user authentication. Due to the inherent anonymity of being online, compared to taking an examination in a classroom environment, students may attempt to artificially boost their scores in online examinations by having another individual take the exam for them, which a typical user/password au- thentication scheme cannot detect. For this purpose, we propose the Framework of Secured Biometric student authentication in Online Examinations. This framework uses a multi-modal authentication approach to secure online examination. The solution comprises of two layers of authentication i.e. student biometric authentication and Knowledge based authentication. In this paper, we propose a framework that provides security to improve on-line examination by utilizing technologies such as biometric authentication based Keystroke Dynamics. This paper attempts to address this important prob- lem by proposing a theoretical framework that incorporates available biometric authentication technologies in conjunction with Knowledge based authen- tication. Discussions on future research and possible implications of the proposed theoretical framework for practice are provided.