Mitigation of Cheating Threats in Digital BYOD exams

Digital exams are not the most common practice in Norwegian higher education, but it is being tested and used at several institutions. Exams are normally conducted on pen and paper with limited access to resources, and it has been a challenge to make an affordable, digital adaption for this type of exams. One approach to create this digital exam environment, is with the use of lock-down browsers on student owned computers. At NTNU they have chosen to use a lock-down browser called Safe Exam Browser, which is continuously being improved and is widely used for digital exams. This thesis looks into whether Safe Exam Browser sufficiently protects against cheating during a digital Bring-Your-Own-Device exam. It will be a technical evaluation of Safe Exam Browser as a software, that ensures a secured exam environment and helps mitigate cheating behaviors. The vulnerabilities of Safe Exam Browser is discovered, evaluated and tested with penetration testing. Safe Exam Browser does have vulnerabilities, and some of them are presented in this thesis. It is open source and for exams conducted at NTNU, it is installed on the examinees personal computers, and it will always be possible that someone choose to use a corrupted version to be able to cheat. There are different mechanisms in this software, to detect and deny access to exams, if the lock-down browser has been modified. These mechanisms make it harder, but not impossible, to make and use a corrupted version