With the growth of Internet and technology in the past decade, online learning 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. 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. We propose the use of challenge questions for student authentication in the online examinations. For this purpose, we designed a profile based authentication framework (PBAF) together with a user-id and password for the authentication of students during online examinations, utilizing a cohort of personal and academic questions as challenge questions. We conducted an empirical study on a group of online students from local and overseas Universities. The result shows the impact of questions type on the usability, in particular the amount of time taken by the introduction of the proposed approach. We also conducted a post experiment survey to collect student feedback on the proposed technique.

Online examinations are an integral component of online learning environments and research studies have identified academic dishonesty as a critical threat to the credibility of such examinations. Academic dishonesty exists in many forms. Collusion is seen as a major security threat, wherein a student invites a third party for help or to impersonate him or her in an online examination. This work aims to investigate the authentication of students using text-based and image-based challenge questions. The study reported in this paper involved 70 online participants from nine countries completing a five week online course and simulating an abuse case scenario. The results of a usability analysis suggested that i) image-based questions are more usable than text-based questions (p < 0.01) and ii) using a more flexible data entry method increased the usability of text-based questions (p < 0.01). An impersonation abuse scenario was simulated to test the influence of sharing with different database sizes. The findings revealed that iii) an increase in the number of questions shared for impersonation increased the success of an impersonation attack and the results showed a significant linear trend (p < 0.01). However, the number of correct answers decreased when the attacker had to memorize and answer the questions in an invigilated online examination or their response to questions was timed. The study also revealed that iv) Educ Inf Technol (2019) an increase in the size of challenge question database decreased the success of an impersonation attack (p < 0.01).

Online examinations are an integral component of many online learning environments, which face many security challenges. Collusion is seen as a major security threat to such examinations, when a student invites a third party to impersonate or abet in a test. This work aims to strengthen the authentication of students via the use of dynamic profile questions. The study reported in this paper involved 31 online participants from five countries over a five-week period. The results of usability and security analysis are reported. The dynamic profile questions were more usable than both the text-based and image-based questions (p < 0.01). An impersonation abuse scenario was simulated using email and mobile phone. The impersonation attack via email was not successful, however, students were able to share answers to dynamic profile questions with a third party impersonator in real time, which resulted in 93% correct answers. The sharing of information via phone took place in real time during Abrar Ullah ( ) Llandaff Campus, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff, CF5 2YB, UK e-mail: aaaullah@cardiffmet.ac.uk Hannan Xiao · Trevor Barker College Lane Campus, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB, UK e-mail: h.xiao@herts.ac.ukTrevor Barker e-mail: t.1.barker@herts.ac.uk an online test and the response time of an impersonator was significantly different (p < 0.01) than a student. The study also revealed that a response time factor may be implemented to identify and report impersonation attacks.

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