Security considerations and two-factor authentication opportunities in e-learning environments

Abstract

In today's fast-paced world access to the right information for the right person at the right time is critical, and it is not necessarily related to business life. The same applies to students using e-learning systems and contents. As there are seemingly never-ending news reporting different types of security vulnerabilities and exploits on a daily basis, security and privacy have become top priorities. People are forced to share confident and sensitive information through different services on the internet, while relying on the security they offer can be misleading at best. Even if strong and complex passwords are required from the users, there is no guarantee that even the underlying protocol or services do not contain any security vulnerabilities. So it is extremely important to realize that other factors must be involved during the authentication process without making it too complicated for the everyday use. In this paper the more and more popular two-factor authentication method is proposed as a reasonable and promising solution, and an example is also given how it can be implemented for e-learning systems currently available.