No abstract

Abstract:Recently, many educational institutions have had to maintain a large number of PCs (educational PCs). It is common for the administrators of these institutions to use a disk image distribution system to manage them all together. It allows the administrators to keep all of their educational PCs in the same configuration with ease. This method, however, robs them of the flexibility of management. Suppose that use of certain application software is restricted to specific users or sites in those institutions. Suppose also that use of other application software is requested to be prohibited by teachers during classes. It is hard for the administrators to satisfy all of these requirements with the traditional method since it causes heavy administrative burden. This paper proposes a flexible method to manage application software on educational Windows PCs without significant efforts of the administrators even with these requirements. The proposed method controls the execution of individual application software on each educational PC to create the requested environments. Teachers as well as the administrators can directly and dynamically change its configuration during their classes. An execution control system was actually implemented as a prototype to show the feasibility of the proposed method.

We have developed a system (traditional system) to flexibly provide the requested applications environment on educational Windows PCs. The traditional system dynamically controls the execution of applications installed on each educational PC depending on the rules defined by teachers as well as by administrators. The traditional system, however, has a low tolerance for malicious attacks. If the execution file of a certain application is falsified, the corresponding rules already applied become invalid. In addition, though the traditional system has a function to define groups of controlled applications, it does not support hierarchical groups. This reduces the usability of the traditional system. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes a control method of application execution using digital certificates. The proposed method has a high tolerance for the falsification of execution files by controlling their executions based on the reliability of the corresponding digital certificates. It also improves its usability by introducing hierarchical group management utilizing hierarchical structure for digital certificates.