Access Control to the Resources of an Open Distributed European Virtual Campus

Abstract

The increasing number of cyber attacks has become a global problem for companies, public institutions, even for governments and for each particular user. Cyber crime causes damage of about 750 billion EUR every year in Europe alone. Thus, ICT security is nowadays a major concern, increasing the demand for specialists in this domain. Currently, universities do not produce enough graduates with strong network security skills able to defend against complex cyber attacks. Recently new EU approved ERASMUS+ project (DECAMP) addresses innovatively this educational aspect. DECAMP brings together within a framework of an international partnership 6 EU universities and 3 associated partners. The project is set up to create 6 online courses with integrated heterogeneous virtual hands-on lab environments covering ICT Security issues of various application areas. Each partner creates a course corresponding to its expertise. These courses can be accessed by all the students, professors and researchers of the universities within the DECAMP consortium as well as from other EU universities. The core of the DECAMP project is an online distributed virtual campus. The paper describes the procedure developed for controlling a secure access of various type of users to the platform of eLearning course materials. The solution complies on one hand with all the differences of enrollment procedures installed at each particular EU university to verify the type of user (student, teacher, researcher, etc) requiring access to the institution's resources. On the other hand the developed mechanism allows the users to obtain a single sign on (SSO) account which support their accesses to all distributed modules of the platform, placed at the corresponding universities which create and maintain them. A prototype system that has been deployed for testing the proposed solutions is also presented.