Infrastructure of E_courses Delivery

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eCX: a secureinfrastructure fore-course delivery

Joe C.K. YauLucas C.K. Hui

Bruce Cheung and

S.M. Yiu

Introduction

Online education becomes one of the most

important channels for students to acquire

knowledge and learning material. Currently,

there are about three types of courses provided

through this education medium:(1) short courses without formal qualifications;

(2) diploma, degree or even higher degree

courses with formal qualifications; and

(3) courses which help students to take public

examinations or to get a formal degree such

as an external London University degree.

Although many projects and researches have

been conducted on online distance learning, the

issues of security have only been studied

recently (Cheung et al., 1999a; Cheung and

Hui, 1999; Furnell et al., 1998, 1999).In fact, there are quite a number of security

concerns in this type of education system, for

example, user authentication and access control,

non-repudiation for critical actions like course

registration, course tuition fee payment,

confidentiality of user personal information,

course material copyright protection, etc. For

more information on what security issues an

online learning system may consider, one can

refer to the security framework given by Furnell

et al. (1998); and for more information on the

problem of user authentication and access

control, one can refer to Cheung et al. (1999a)

and Cheung and Hui (1999). In particular,

Cheung et al. (1999) provides a security model

such that a legitimately registered student cannot

easily share the account with non-registered

students.

Depending on the type of courses offered by

an organization, the security concerns may

differ slightly. There is one security problem,

the copyright protection problem, which is

important to all kinds of e-courses, especiallyfor type (1) and (3) courses mentioned above.

Typical scenarios include the following:

registered students infringing the copyrights of

the course materials by passing the materials to

non-registered students. Usually, the

organization providing the course materials

depends on the registration fee to maintain the

operation of the organization. This copyright

infringement severely jeopardizes the income of

the organization.

The authors

Joe C.K. Yau is a Software Engineer, Lucas C.K. Hui is

Associate Professor and S.M. Yiu is a Teaching Consultant,

all at the Department of Computer Science and Information

Systems, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

Bruce Cheung is a Lecturer at the School of Professionaland Continuing Education, The University of Hong Kong,

Hong Kong.

Keywords

Security, Copyright, Applications software,

Learning organizations, Distance learning, Online computing

Abstract

Online education has emerged as one of the major channels

for dissemination of learning materials. As more and more

organizations offer online distance learning courses, the

security concerns of these online education systems become

more and more critical, especially when the organizations

rely on the registration fees of students to maintain the

smooth running of the courses. Provides a mechanism, the

Secure e-Course eXchange (eCX), to protect the learning

material from unauthorized dissemination, and shows how

this mechanism can be integrated in the operation model of

online learning course providers. The design of eCX is

general enough to fit two operating models, namely the

Institutional Server Model and the Corporate Server Model.

Electronic access

The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at

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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is

available at

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/1066-2243.htm

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Volume 13 . Number 2 . 2003 . pp. 116-125

# MCB UP Limited . ISSN 1066-2243

DOI 10.1108/10662240310469060


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Some argue that, for courses that lead to

formal qualifications, as long as students are

required to pay for writing the examinations,

freely distributing the course materials should

not be a matter. They argue that even without

protecting the copyrights of the materials, the

income of the organization could still besecured via examination fees. However, this

only fits type (2) courses mentioned above

which is a very narrowed model within the

online education trend. Moreover, the trend of

online education is that there will be

organizations holding examinations and

granting students the qualifications, while other

organizations may be producing the course

materials to assist students in learning the

materials and preparing them for the

examinations. In such cases, this ``charge-by-

examination'' model would not be appropriate,

and the copyrights of the course materials still

have to be protected.

The copyright protection problem for

e-Course material has been receiving little

attention. A good framework for online

education has been given in Furnell et al.

(1998), but the security issue for protecting the

copyright of the course materials has not been

addressed. Not long ago, another paper Furnell

et al. (1999) has studied the problem, but the

discussion is brief. In particular, it does not

provide an effective approach for copyright

protection and copyright detection in the

domain of online education. In this paper, we

give a design, the Secure e-Course eXchange

(eCX), on how to make the process of copying

``extremely difficult'' for users so as to protect

the copyright of the materials disseminated

through an e-Course. More importantly, we

also demonstrate how this design can be

incorporated in the operation model of online

learning course providers. The design can fit

into two operating models, namely theInstitutional Server Model and the Corporate

Server Model.

This study of copyright protection for e-

Course material is conducted by the SPACE

Online Universal Learning (SOUL) Project

Group of the School of Professional and

Continuing Education of the University of

Hong Kong (HKU SPACE). HKU SPACE is

one of the leading adult education providers in

Hong Kong. It provides life-long learning for

the public. The number of students registered

with HKU SPACE programmes is more than

70,000 and the figure is expected to go up at a

tremendous rate. In order to provide effective

support for online distance learning, the SOUL

Project Group was established in 1998. The

aim of the project is to provide online supportfor educational purposes; to develop HKU

SPACE online support courses in both Hong

Kong and Mainland China; and to carry out

researches related to online learning. The

SOUL platform is the major product of the

Project Group. As of October 2002, more than

21,000 students and teachers are using the

platform. For more information about the

SOUL system, please refer to (SOUL, 2002).

The rest of the paper is organized as follows:

the ``Background'' section briefly describes the

copyright protection problem. The core

technologies used in eCX will be given in ``The

secure e-Course eXchange (eCX)'' section. The

``Operations of eCX'' section will discuss the

operations of eCX. In the ``Trusting hierarchy

and operating models of e-institutes'' section,

we will discuss how eCX could be applied to

two different online education operating

models. Finally, we will provide some

concluding remarks in the last section.

Background

Although digital copyright protection in the

domain of the online learning system is a rather

new subject, there have been studies on this

problem in other domains. (For examples,

please refer to Brin et al., 1995; Dittmann and

Nack, 2000; Memon and Wong, 1998.) The

security concerning copyright is basically

divided into two major topics: copyright

detection and copyright protection. Interested

readers can refer to (Wayner, 1997) for moreinformation.

Copyright detection makes it easier to

discover the activities of unauthorized copying

or dissemination of the copyrighted materials.

Copyright detection techniques can be used

identify the owner of the copyrighted material,

and, hence, to track down copyright violators

who illegally disseminate the material. One

major technique used for copyright detection

on multimedia data is watermarking (Johnson

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et al., 2001; Katzenbeisser et al., 2000). While

watermarking is quite useful in imaging data,

the applicability of the technique in text-based

materials is not straightforward. Also, for

material that is expected to have a wide

distribution (i.e. there are many legal users to

the material), keeping tracking of all legal copiesof the material becomes infeasible. In the

domain of online distance learning, most course

materials are text-based, and the distribution is

expected to be wide. Hence, protecting the

copyright by means of copyright detection does

not seem to be an effective approach.

On the other hand, copyright protection tries

to make unauthorized copying of materials

difficult or ``impossible''. Existing techniques

(Furnell et al., 1999; Wayner, 1997) include the

following: users cannot obtain a permanent

copy of the materials and must access the

materials using a ``secure'' and proprietary

browser. That is, users have to stay online while

using the materials. This approach creates some

inconvenience to the users. Another approach is

to couple the access rights to the material

(possibly a piece of data or software) with a

hardware configuration of the entitled

computer. The material itself may be encrypted

where the encryption key would be dependent

on the configuration of the legitimate computer.

In this case, even if the materials have been

illegally passed on to another user or computer,

the illegal copy will not function properly.

These approaches of copyright protection have

been used in some e-book systems and software

such as the product activation technique used in

Microsoft Windows XP (Microsoft, 2002).

For our study of the copyright protection

problem, we have extra design requirements,

which make our problem no easier, if not more

difficult, to solve. First, after some research on

the existing network facilities, we discovered

that it is expensive for students to remainonline. This means that, if the course material

must be viewed online, it will increase the

financial burden of the students and will make

e-courses not as attractive. Second, requiring

students to stay online means that students will

not be able to study when making network

connection is not possible. For example, using a

notebook computer to study while the student

is away from home for a business trip would not

be possible. Third, the bandwidth of the

network connection of students, who are

ordinary home users, is yet to meet the

demanding requirements for delivering material

of media types other than text or simple

graphical images, for example, video clips or

audio clips. Therefore, we propose a solution

whereby the students are allowed to download

the course material on to their own computer,

and be able to view the material offline. This

extra requirement makes the copyright

protection problem much more difficult and

challenging.

In this paper, we will propose a copyright

protection solution for the e-education domain,

the ecure e-Course eXchange (eCX). We will

show how eCX integrates copyright protection

techniques applied in other domains, as well as

encryption techniques to make copyrightprotection for e-Course material possible. We

will also show how eCX allows students to

retain a complete copy of the course material

while making it difficult to create or disseminate

copies of the material to other unauthorized

users. As a remark, due to the nature of the

digital data, none of the existing approaches can

provide perfect security regarding these

copyright problems, and it is very unlikely that

such methods exist. However, as long as it is

difficult for students to pass the materials to

other unauthorized users, most of the students

will register for the courses and obtain the

material in a proper manner.

The secure e-Course eXchange (eCX)

The secure e-Course eXchange (eCX) is a set

of software modules designed to work together

to protect the copyright of e-Course material.

These modules are shattered among various

components in PowerEdBuilder thearchitecture for the SOUL platform. Before

giving a detailed discussion on eCX, we will

give a brief description on PowerEdBuilder.

Figure 1 depicts a system overview of

PowerEdBuilder.

As PowerEdBuilder is designed to be used by

three different parties, namely instructors,

institutes and students, there are three software

components specifically designed for them.

They are the Content Engineering System, the

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e-Institute, and the e-Learning Platform

respectively.

The Content Engineering System (CES) is

designed for instructors to create e-Course

materials and to launch e-Courses. There is an

eCX sub-module, called the Course Launcher,

residing in CES which is used for launching

e-Courses. The e-Institute is the administration

center of the platform. It is used for handling

student registration, course registration, course

payment, as well as course materials hosting

and downloading. The e-Learning Platform is

the client software installed on the students'

computers. It consists of two software

components: the Personal Classroom and the

Course Downloader. The Personal Classroom

is the software which students use for viewing

the course material. At the core of the Personal

Classroom is the SmartTutor, which is an

intelligent tutoring system built with artificial

intelligent technology, used for assisting

students in their learning process and to provide

guidance to students like a human tutor. The

Course Downloader is used for assisting

students in downloading e-Courses. It uses a

proprietary protocol to communicate with the

e-Institute for registering and downloadinge-Courses. Besides these three major

components, PowerEdBuilder also has a

Communication and Searching Infrastructure

(CSI) providing efficient and secure

communication channels among instructors,

institutes, and students. Lastly, the Secure

e-Course eXchange (eCX) provides

infrastructure for protecting the copyrighted

materials. In this paper, we will only focus on

the eCX related modules. For details about the

other components of PowerEdBuilder,

please refer to (Yau et al., 2002a; Cheung et al.,

2002a, b). Please also refer to our conference

papers (Yau et al., 2002b, c) for discussions onvarious development stages of eCX.

At the core of eCX, there are two important

technologies designed specifically for this

copyright protection system. They are the

Offline-Online Course and the Computer

License.

The offline-online course

As discussed above in the ``Background''

section, we believe that allowing students to

download e-Course material and view them

offline is beneficial to the students. The Offline-Online Course is a proprietary technology

designed specifically to make this possible.

Ordinary e-Course implementation requires

students to view the course material online, and

the material is stored in the server hosting the

course. On the contrary, the Offline-Online

Course permits students to download the

course material to their own computers and

view the material offline, while making it

difficult to perform unauthorized copying.

Basically, an instructor will compose

e-Course materials using the Content

Engineering System. When the preparation is

done, the instructor can make use of the Course

Launcher, one of the eCX modules situated at

the CES, to launch the newly created e-Course

to an affiliated e-Institute server (please see the

``Course Launching'' section for more details).

The launching process will create two objects

based on the e-Course material. They are the

Course Package and the Course Voucher. The

Figure 1 System overview of PowerEdBuilder

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Course Package contains the online material,

and is encrypted by some symmetrical

encryption algorithm. The Course Voucher

contains different information about the course.

Most importantly, it contains the encryption

key for decrypting the Course Package. This

implies that, for viewing the course material,one must possess both the Course Package and

the Course Voucher for the course. Once the

e-Course is successfully launched, the Course

Package will be distributed over the network

and could be downloaded by students.

To take an available e-Course, students have

to register for it (please see the ``Course

Registration'' section for details). Students can

download the Course Package, and they must

also obtain the Course Voucher from the

e-Institute server in order to view the course

material. Please note that students are charged

for obtaining the Course Voucher, but not

charged for downloading the Course Package.

The whole process of obtaining the Course

Package and the Course Voucher, as well as the

payment process are all handled by the Course

Downloader software of the e-Learning

Platform.

The design of eCX applies PKI technology

Public Key Infrastructure (Stallings, 1999) to

tighten its security. As will be discussed below,

in the next section, all students possess a PKI

key-pair. When the Course Voucher is

delivered from the e-Institute server to the

student, the Course Voucher will be encrypted

using the student's public key, which can only

be decrypted using the student's private key.

When this encrypted Course Voucher is

received by the student, it will be stored

securely on the student's computer in this

encrypted form, which can only be accessed by

the Personal Classroom of the e-Learning

Platform. When the student possesses both the

Course Package and the Course Voucher, he/she can make use of the Personal Classroom

for viewing the e-Course material offline. The

next subsection will show why the offline

material obtained cannot be easily transferred

to others.

Computer License

The Computer License is a special object that

resides in the student's computer. It is created

when the student installs the e-Learning

Platform software on to his/her computer.

During the installation, a PKI key-pair is

generated. A hardware profile recording the

hardware configuration of the student's

computer is also generated. The public key of

the key-pair and this hardware profile are both

stored inside the Computer License. Besides,some personal information about the student is

also stored in this Computer License. This

makes Computer License unique to each

computer. This Computer License is then sent

to the e-Institute server, which the student has

affiliation with. The e-Institute server will

verify this Computer License, assign to it an

expiry date, and sign it digitally. The server

will send the signed Computer License back to

the student's computer. Note that in order to

keep information confidential, the

communication between the server and the

student's computer is done over some secure

communication channel (e.g. the Secure

Socket Layer SSL).

When a student invokes the Personal

Classroom software of the e-Learning Platform

for viewing the course material, the Computer

License will first be examined and check if

this invocation is valid. The invocation is valid

only if:. the Computer License is properly signed by

an e-Institute server;. the Computer License has not expired; and. the software is invoked on the computer on

which it was originally installed.

While the first two conditions are trivial, the

third condition requires some elaboration.

During the invocation, a hardware profile will

be generated to reflect the current hardware

configuration of the computer. This hardware

profile is compared with the hardware profile

stored in the Computer License. The third

condition will only be satisfied if the twohardware profiles match.

When a student has registered for an

e-Course, both the Course Package and the

Course Voucher will be under the student's

possession. As mentioned above, the Course

Package is protected by some symmetric

encryption. Since the encryption key to the

Course Package is contained in the Course

Voucher, the Course Voucher must also be

protected on the student's computer. When

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the Course Voucher is received from the

e-Institute, it is encrypted with the computer's

public key using some asymmetric

cryptographic algorithm, such as RSA

(Stallings, 1999). This public key is in fact the

one stored in the Computer License. After this

encrypted Course Voucher is received from thee-Institute, it will be stored in the student's

computer in this encrypted form. Since it is

encrypted with the computer's public key, it can

only be decrypted by using the computer's

private key. The private key to this key-pair is

stored in some special location on the

computer's hard disk. The only time that a

Course Voucher is not encrypted is when the

student is viewing the course material. Please

refer to the ``Course Viewing'' section for

more details.

The Computer License is vital to the design

of eCX. By comparing the computer's hardware

profile with the one stored on the Computer

License, we can be sure that the Personal

Classroom is invoked on the computer where

the Computer License was originally issued to,

and the material can only be viewed on this

same computer. It prohibits unauthorized users

from using illegal copies of the course material.

Some of the other copyright protection systems

are breakable if the software and the protected

material are all copied on to another computer,

and most will fail if the hard disk is completely

duplicated. However, since eCX employs

Computer License, it would not be vulnerable

to these attacks.

Under some unexpected, yet possible

situations, hard disks of a student's computer may

fail which makes the retrieval of the student's

Computer License not possible. In that case, the

student would have to contact the institute and

request the re-issuing of a new Computer License.

Note that this re-issuing of the Computer License

is totally governed by the institute. Administrativepolicy can be applied to limit such re-issuing to

stop students from cheating. Note, also, that

when a Computer License is re-issued to a

student, the old Computer License will be

revoked at the same time.

In addition, the Computer License is

designed to have an expiry date, and the typical

lifetime of a Computer License is six months.

Before a Computer License expires, the

e-Learning Platform software will contact the

e-Institute server for renewal. By keeping track

of students' Computer Licenses, the institute

will make sure that there is only one valid

Computer License for each student. In a case

where a student cheats and request for re-

issuing Computer License, or the student's

private key is compromised, the old ComputerLicense would have been revoked and renewal

will not be possible.

Despite all its advantages, the Computer

License approach does have its own

disadvantage. If the hardware configuration of

the system is changed substantially, the

Computer License may be made invalid and the

student needs to contact the institute for

appropriate action. In our current

implementation, we have put in some tolerance

in this hardware configuration verification. Our

experience has been satisfactory and users'

feedback is positive.

Operations of eCX

In this section, we will describe the details of the

key operations, such as course launching,

course registration, and course viewing, of eCX.

Course Launching

As mentioned above, when an e-Course is

launched using the Course Launcher, two

objects, the Course Package and the Course

Voucher, will be created from the e-Course

material. The Course Launcher will send these

two objects through some secure

communication channel (e.g. SSL) to the

Voucher Administrator, which is a module

integrated into the e-Institute (see Figure 2).

Under the Voucher Administrator, the objects

are stored in a database and made available for

students to download.

Course registration

To register for an e-Course, the student has to

invoke the Course Downloader software of the

e-Learning Platform (see Figure 2). The

Course Downloader will establish a secure

communication connection with the Voucher

Administrator (e.g. SSL) to obtain the Course

Voucher. Students are not charged for

downloading the Course Package, but are

charged electronically and automatically for

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obtaining the Course Voucher. The Voucher

Administrator will validate the student's

Computer License sent by the Course

Downloader and encrypt the voucher with the

student computer's public key. The encrypted

Course Voucher will be sent to student's

Course Downloader, then stored in the

Voucher Store of the student's machine in its

encrypted form.

Course viewing

After registering for an e-Course, the student

can use the Personal Classroom software of the

e-Learning Platform to view the course

material. Just as described in the ``ComputerLicense'' section, the Personal Classroom will

only proceed if the invocation validation is

successful. Once it is successfully invoked, the

Personal Classroom will obtain the Course

Voucher from the Voucher Store for decrypting

the Course Package. Note that, both the

Personal Classroom and the Voucher Store

processes are executed on the student's

computer. To guarantee the security of the

system, and to ensure the e-Course material is

well protected, these two processes will go

through a special authentication process to

mutually authenticate each other.

When this authentication process is done, the

Voucher Store will use the computer's private

key to decrypt the Course Voucher which was

previously encrypted by the e-Institute server

using the computer's public key (please see the

``Course Registration'' section for details).

Afterwards, the Voucher Store will release the

decrypted Course Voucher to the Personal

Classroom where it will be used for decrypting

the Course Package. Note that for security

reasons and performance reasons, the Personal

Classroom will decrypt the course materialfrom the Course Package in a material-on-

demand fashion.

Trusting hierarchy and operating modelsof e-institutes

The trusting hierarchy

PowerEdBuilder is designed so that many

e-Institute servers may exist on the network. A

Figure 2 A detail diagram of PowerEdBuilder (CSI omitted for simplicity)

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possible real life example wouud be for

different companies to host their own servers

for in-house training programmes. These

servers, together with the student computers,

form a trusting hierarchy (see Figure 3).

Student computers belong to the lowest level

of the hierarchy, which has the least privilege.They could be authenticated by checking their

Computer Licenses. The only authority they

have is to digitally sign payment confirmations

for registering e-Courses. The

e-Institute servers belong to the middle level of

the hierarchy. These servers are the Certificate

Authorities (CA) for issuing Computer

Licenses to student computers. Each of these

servers possesses a Server Certificate, which is

used for proving its own identity to others. The

eCX Root Certificate Authority is in the

highest level of the hierarchy. It possesses the

Root Key to the whole PowerEdBuilder

trusting hierarchy, and is the root of the

trusting hierarchy. It signs the Server

Certificate of all of the servers in the

middle level.

The two server models

The eCX is designed to suit the needs of two

different operating models. They are the

Institutional Server Model and the Corporate

Server Model.

The Institutional Server Model is a server

model that is tailored to be used by educationalorganizations. All Institutional Servers are

equipped with a Server Certificate signed by the

Root Certificate Authority. They have the

authority of signing and issuing Computer

License for students registered under them.

There can be many servers operating under this

model, and each server is authorized to issue

Computer Licenses. Besides having computer

licenses issued by themselves, these institutional

servers can be configured to honor Computer

Licenses issued by other Institutional Servers.

However, they will never honor Computer

Licenses issued by any Corporate Servers.

An Institutional Server has no limitation as

to the number of ``copies'' of an e-Course that

it can issue to students. The revenue

generated from the course will be split among

Figure 3 Trusting hierarchy of e-institute servers

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different parties according to the payment

agreement.

The Corporate Server Model is a server

model that is tailored to be used by business

organizations for corporate training. All

Corporate Servers are equipped with a Server

Certificate signed by the Root CertificateAuthority. They have the authority of signing

and issuing Computer Licenses for students

registered under them (i.e. their own staff).

Servers operating under the Corporate

Server Model function are very much like

those under the Institutional Server Model

except for three ways. The first difference is

that a Corporate Server only honors

Computer Licenses issued by itself. It will not

honor any Computer Licenses from any other

servers, regardless if the license is issued by

another Institutional Server or another

Corporate Server. The second difference is

that since a Corporate Server is operated

within the same corporation, it can have a

different mechanism for the payment system.

The course registration may be free for all of

its staff members, or charging according to

cost centers, etc. The third difference is that a

Corporate Server pays the instructor (i.e. the

e-Course provider) at a bulk rate. The

corporate pays the instructor a certain

amount of money for a fixed number of copies

of the e-Course, and the server will be limited

to issue that many copies of the

e-Course. In other words, the server can only

send a limited number of copies of a Course

Voucher to its staff members.

Conclusion

In this paper, we consider the problem of

copyright protection of online learning material

in the domain of e-Courses. We propose amechanism, called the Secure e-Course

eXchange (eCX), which allows students to

store a local copy of the material while making

the sharing of the material, with non-registered

students, difficult. The design of eCX is flexible

to fit two operating models, namely the

Institutional Server Model and the Corporate

Server Model. This design has been

implemented in an actual online learning

system, the SOUL platform, for the School of

Professional and Continuing Education of the

University of Hong Kong.

As one future direction of research,

evaluation on the eCX will be performed

shortly, and the results will be used in the

refinement of eCX and other PowerEdBuilder

components. In fact, there are many other

security issues regarding online learning

systems, such as online submission of

assignments (Luck and Joy, 1999), which are

not addressed in this paper. Therefore, other

future research directions would be to tackle

those security problems.

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Harasim, L. (1999), `À framework for online learning: the

virtual-U'', IEEE Computer, pp. 44-9.

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