A trusted assessment environment in a network-booted OS

This paper describes how a laboratory where students usually access the LAN using personal accounts can be configured during examinations. Test questions are automatically corrected by a learning-management system, which is used to authenticate students (who are further identified by physical presence). During assessment conditions, students must have access only to the URL where the test is located. Access must be denied not only to other websites but also to any notes or materials the students may have stored in their personal space on the LAN. The authors previously implemented such access policies through Microsoft Windows (R) user-profiling but have now achieved promising results by booting into RAM a customized GNU/Linux operating system over the network.