Re: Quiz robot

[Rhandeev Singh <rhandeev@comp.nus.edu.sg>]

On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Bill Tihen wrote:
> Please don't close out the option to open ended questions.  Preventing
> copying and cheating however would be good.  Maybe a verifacation process too.

That gets me thinking along the lines of encryption.  IMHO, public key
cryptography would be applicable here, similar to what ssh and pgp do: use
a test administrator's public key to encrypt the data.

This would require his private key to decrypt it, and only the test
administrator should know his passphrase (that was used to encrypt his
private key so that only he can "unlock" his private key for use by a
test program to decrypt and access the test database).

Unfortunately, there is no point at all in doing any form of encryption
when the databases are under an open content license -- and we're not
about to change that ;-)

This looks like a challenging issue.

---
Rhandeev Singh                          rhandeev@comp.nus.edu.sg
Linux User Group                        http://linux.comp.nus.edu.sg
School of Computing                     http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg
National University of Singapore