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Finland's Upper Secondary School Exams Going All-Linux
First time accepted submitter jovius writes "The Matriculation Examination Board of Finland has just opened an international hacking contest to find flaws and exploits in Digabi Live — the Live Debian based operating system to be used in the all-digital final exams by the year 2016. The contest ends on 1st of September, and the winners are about to scoop hefty hardware prizes, also available as cash."
Oh come on, Finns! Didn't you get the memo that only Windows 8 will provide a future for all students? Clearly the comparatively high quality and level of education of Finnish students is burning, and they must jump. It cannot be sustained, so the existing system must be abandoned. It is time to adopt the Microsoft education curriculum. With this, Finland can successfully, drastically reduce the number of educators, divest huge amounts of school real estate, slash maintenance costs, and give the five remaining students a wonderful head start on their success.
Yours truly, Stephen Elop.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Surely the headline - which appears to refer to school exams - needs to be altered. Great story though...
No need for modern gimmicks such as eurosigns on Slashdot.
Seem to be two separate stories here...
1 - Matriculation Examination Board of Finland is replacing pen/paper exams with exams in a live-cd (or usb-booted live environment or similar) examination system (and with associated back end systems, databases, aaa, etc)
2 - Matriculation Examination Board of Finland is holding a hacking competition to find security flaws/vulnerabilities in the student live-cd OS.
Depends on the municipality. Some give students laptops from the school, some support students buying their own devices with x euros, some do nothing to help students secure a device.
It's important to note that they've made guidelines on what sort of devices are supported for the exam and the way it's done. It completely rules out any of the current tablets and pretty much narrows it down to a traditional laptops running x86(or amd64) processors. They've also got pretty good rules for setting up the exam environment.
That being said, I think there will be plenty of problems to sort through.
Is it supposed to be running on the students own machines? Not school desktops or school laptops or laptops given away from the school?
The workstation specifications are given here. Booting from external media (DVD, USB) is a requirement, so although it's not stated, I'd expect that running Digabi inside a VM would not count.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Right now, all the details are up to evaluation whatever seems most feasible.
Taken from project's website, the most likely way forward now is a USB-bootable live Linux distro on a laptop that has been maximally gutted in its ability to access anything else but a predefined server and the USB stick it boots on. Like, not having hardware drivers for the hdd etc. There also won't be any other programs except those needed to do the test installed, and the exam participant's user account won't have privileges to install anything else either, of course. The systems are most likely going to be booted by the administrators before test begins, (and the laptops, if owned by the students, have to be turned in for checks -- although if it's done in the same spirit as checks for graphing calculators are, the actual checks are randomly done. No school has enough manpower to do a sweep checks for every machine). There most certainly won't be any virtualization software included with the programs the exam taker can run.
The problem would at that point to prevent the student to boot into another OS in the middle of exam, accessing whatever, and then booting back test system again. Maybe they'll include constantly home-calling ping to some central server which will notify the local admins that "exam taker #34234 is up to something no good. Go look over his/her shoulder constantly for a while". Also, rebooting the whole computer would most likely be visible enough for the exam administrators (who are, or should be, on constant outlook for cheaters in any case).
That being said... a entrepreneuring (and skilled) exam taker could, with some hardware hacking, overcome many of these blocks in order to bring unauthorized materials into the exam and maybe even succeed in going unnoticed. That's why I'd really think the school districts (or the state) should just scrap the BYOD idea and shell the cash for bunch of cheap (around €200 or so) laptops. Since they would be usable for many years only for this purpose with tailor-made OS, it won't have to be *that* powerful anyway.
You can use the € HTML entity. It's a bit longer to type but it should work to get a nice €