"About 6,000 students in Norway are doing exams on their laptops in a trial that could soon be rolled out across the country."
With the current state and progress of technology and use of Internet, it seems inevitable to avoid using laptops, PDAs, etc. for daily tasks. Electronic exams have been around for a while but allowing kids to play around with the laptops outside exam hours may have its disadvantages. A curious teenager with a lot of free time may try to perform escalation attacks due to bugs in regular applications or the OS (probably M$oft):
"The laptops issued to the students are used for everyday schoolwork and come with standard software, such as word processors, spreadsheets and calculators installed, as well as subject specific applications for particular courses."
The access control program supposedly prevents students from cheating during the exam or communicating to any others with the help of monitoring feature:
"The program works as a keylogger and takes screenshots and we can very easily get a graphic of what the students have used or have done."
What happens when someone escalates privileges due to a bug in a well-known application (e.g. MS Word, Adobe Photoshop) during non-exam hours and manipulates the access control program that monitors the students? Are they able to boot up a different OS via live CD? Can they partition the drive to install a second OS (e.g. Linux) and play around with registry settings or other data in the original installation? Can they change the harddisk prior to the exam, install a different OS running virtual environment (VMWare, virtualbox, etc.) and run school provided OS on a virtual machine while being able to communicate with peers though the host (it's just as easy as few clicks to convert a physical box to virtual nowadays)? I just think that it is a matter of time when these laptops will be hacked or students will find a way to cheat the system without really exploiting a software bug, if they really want (it would also depend on the culture and their etchical values of course).
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