Mar 07 2008
Your key to the Internet - literally
Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Freedom Sticks For The Classroom
Alec has posted an interesting article about his efforts to get around overly restrictive filtering and access controls. In our back and forth comments a thought occured to me. What if we were to use USB drives as “keys” to the internet. Here’s the idea:
- The teacher is given a USB key that includes a file with an encrypted sequence of characters that acts as their “authorization code”.
- When they log into the network, the login script looks for the key file and verifies the authorization code on the USB drive is the same as the one associated with the teacher’s account.
- If they match, the teacher is granted full access.
What if scenarios:
- Teacher logs in without the USB key - teacher is given standard network access (student level)
- Student logs in with teacher’s USB key on student account - no special permissions are granted and a notification is sent to IT
- One teacher logs in with another teacher’s USB key - only student level access is granted.
- USB key is lost - the authorization code for that teacher is changed on the server, immediately making the old code invalid
I’m sure there are dozens of other situations we would need to take into account (and that it’s similar to VPN connections but not quite), but I’m curious what the IT people and teachers out there would think of this?
