Introduction
eCX: a secure
infrastructure for
e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau
Lucas C.K. Hui
Bruce Cheung and
S.M. Yiu
The authors
Joe C.K. Yau is a Software Engineer, Lucas C.K. Hui is
Associate Professor and S.M. Yiu is a Teaching Consultant,
all at the Department of Computer Science and Information
Systems, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Bruce Cheung is a Lecturer at the School of Professional
and Continuing Education, The University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong.
Keywords
Security, Copyright, Applications software,
Learning organizations, Distance learning, Online computing
Abstract
Online education has emerged as one of the major channels
for dissemination of learning materials. As more and more
organizations offer online distance learning courses, the
security concerns of these online education systems become
more and more critical, especially when the organizations
rely on the registration fees of students to maintain the
smooth running of the courses. Provides a mechanism, the
Secure e-Course eXchange (eCX), to protect the learning
material from unauthorized dissemination, and shows how
this mechanism can be integrated in the operation model of
online learning course providers. The design of eCX is
general enough to fit two operating models, namely the
Institutional Server Model and the Corporate Server Model.
Electronic access
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Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy
Volume 13 . Number 2 . 2003 . pp. 116-125
# MCB UP Limited . ISSN 1066-2243
DOI 10.1108/10662240310469060
116
Online education becomes one of the most
important channels for students to acquire
knowledge and learning material. Currently,
there are about three types of courses provided
through this education medium:
(1) short courses without formal qualifications;
(2) diploma, degree or even higher degree
courses with formal qualifications; and
(3) courses which help students to take public
examinations or to get a formal degree such
as an external London University degree.
Although many projects and researches have
been conducted on online distance learning, the
issues of security have only been studied
recently (Cheung et al., 1999a; Cheung and
Hui, 1999; Furnell et al., 1998, 1999).
In fact, there are quite a number of security
concerns in this type of education system, for
example, user authentication and access control,
non-repudiation for critical actions like course
registration, course tuition fee payment,
confidentiality of user personal information,
course material copyright protection, etc. For
more information on what security issues an
online learning system may consider, one can
refer to the security framework given by Furnell
et al. (1998); and for more information on the
problem of user authentication and access
control, one can refer to Cheung et al. (1999a)
and Cheung and Hui (1999). In particular,
Cheung et al. (1999) provides a security model
such that a legitimately registered student cannot
easily share the account with non-registered
students.
Depending on the type of courses offered by
an organization, the security concerns may
differ slightly. There is one security problem,
the copyright protection problem, which is
important to all kinds of e-courses, especially
for type (1) and (3) courses mentioned above.
Typical scenarios include the following:
registered students infringing the copyrights of
the course materials by passing the materials to
non-registered students. Usually, the
organization providing the course materials
depends on the registration fee to maintain the
operation of the organization. This copyright
infringement severely jeopardizes the income of
the organization.
 eCX: a secure infrastructure for e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau, Lucas C.K. Hui, Bruce Cheung and S.M. Yiu
Some argue that, for courses that lead to
formal qualifications, as long as students are
required to pay for writing the examinations,
freely distributing the course materials should
not be a matter. They argue that even without
protecting the copyrights of the materials, the
income of the organization could still be
secured via examination fees. However, this
only fits type (2) courses mentioned above
which is a very narrowed model within the
online education trend. Moreover, the trend of
online education is that there will be
organizations holding examinations and
granting students the qualifications, while other
organizations may be producing the course
materials to assist students in learning the
materials and preparing them for the
examinations. In such cases, this ``charge-by-
examination'' model would not be appropriate,
and the copyrights of the course materials still
have to be protected.
The copyright protection problem for
e-Course material has been receiving little
attention. A good framework for online
education has been given in Furnell et al.
(1998), but the security issue for protecting the
copyright of the course materials has not been
addressed. Not long ago, another paper Furnell
et al. (1999) has studied the problem, but the
discussion is brief. In particular, it does not
provide an effective approach for copyright
protection and copyright detection in the
domain of online education. In this paper, we
give a design, the Secure e-Course eXchange
(eCX), on how to make the process of copying
``extremely difficult'' for users so as to protect
the copyright of the materials disseminated
through an e-Course. More importantly, we
also demonstrate how this design can be
incorporated in the operation model of online
learning course providers. The design can fit
into two operating models, namely the
Institutional Server Model and the Corporate
Server Model.
This study of copyright protection for e-
Course material is conducted by the SPACE
Online Universal Learning (SOUL) Project
Group of the School of Professional and
Continuing Education of the University of
Hong Kong (HKU SPACE). HKU SPACE is
one of the leading adult education providers in
Hong Kong. It provides life-long learning for
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Volume 13 . Number 2 . 2003 . 116-125
the public. The number of students registered
with HKU SPACE programmes is more than
70,000 and the figure is expected to go up at a
tremendous rate. In order to provide effective
support for online distance learning, the SOUL
Project Group was established in 1998. The
aim of the project is to provide online support
for educational purposes; to develop HKU
SPACE online support courses in both Hong
Kong and Mainland China; and to carry out
researches related to online learning. The
SOUL platform is the major product of the
Project Group. As of October 2002, more than
21,000 students and teachers are using the
platform. For more information about the
SOUL system, please refer to (SOUL, 2002).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
the ``Background'' section briefly describes the
copyright protection problem. The core
technologies used in eCX will be given in ``The
secure e-Course eXchange (eCX)'' section. The
``Operations of eCX'' section will discuss the
operations of eCX. In the ``Trusting hierarchy
and operating models of e-institutes'' section,
we will discuss how eCX could be applied to
two different online education operating
models. Finally, we will provide some
concluding remarks in the last section.
Background
Although digital copyright protection in the
domain of the online learning system is a rather
new subject, there have been studies on this
problem in other domains. (For examples,
please refer to Brin et al., 1995; Dittmann and
Nack, 2000; Memon and Wong, 1998.) The
security concerning copyright is basically
divided into two major topics: copyright
detection and copyright protection. Interested
readers can refer to (Wayner, 1997) for more
information.
Copyright detection makes it easier to
discover the activities of unauthorized copying
or dissemination of the copyrighted materials.
Copyright detection techniques can be used
identify the owner of the copyrighted material,
and, hence, to track down copyright violators
who illegally disseminate the material. One
major technique used for copyright detection
on multimedia data is watermarking (Johnson
 eCX: a secure infrastructure for e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau, Lucas C.K. Hui, Bruce Cheung and S.M. Yiu
et al., 2001; Katzenbeisser et al., 2000). While
watermarking is quite useful in imaging data,
the applicability of the technique in text-based
materials is not straightforward. Also, for
material that is expected to have a wide
distribution (i.e. there are many legal users to
the material), keeping tracking of all legal copies
of the material becomes infeasible. In the
domain of online distance learning, most course
materials are text-based, and the distribution is
expected to be wide. Hence, protecting the
copyright by means of copyright detection does
not seem to be an effective approach.
On the other hand, copyright protection tries
to make unauthorized copying of materials
difficult or ``impossible''. Existing techniques
(Furnell et al., 1999; Wayner, 1997) include the
following: users cannot obtain a permanent
copy of the materials and must access the
materials using a ``secure'' and proprietary
browser. That is, users have to stay online while
using the materials. This approach creates some
inconvenience to the users. Another approach is
to couple the access rights to the material
(possibly a piece of data or software) with a
hardware configuration of the entitled
computer. The material itself may be encrypted
where the encryption key would be dependent
on the configuration of the legitimate computer.
In this case, even if the materials have been
illegally passed on to another user or computer,
the illegal copy will not function properly.
These approaches of copyright protection have
been used in some e-book systems and software
such as the product activation technique used in
Microsoft Windows XP (Microsoft, 2002).
For our study of the copyright protection
problem, we have extra design requirements,
which make our problem no easier, if not more
difficult, to solve. First, after some research on
the existing network facilities, we discovered
that it is expensive for students to remain
online. This means that, if the course material
must be viewed online, it will increase the
financial burden of the students and will make
e-courses not as attractive. Second, requiring
students to stay online means that students will
not be able to study when making network
connection is not possible. For example, using a
notebook computer to study while the student
is away from home for a business trip would not
be possible. Third, the bandwidth of the
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network connection of students, who are
ordinary home users, is yet to meet the
demanding requirements for delivering material
of media types other than text or simple
graphical images, for example, video clips or
audio clips. Therefore, we propose a solution
whereby the students are allowed to download
the course material on to their own computer,
and be able to view the material offline. This
extra requirement makes the copyright
protection problem much more difficult and
challenging.
In this paper, we will propose a copyright
protection solution for the e-education domain,
the ecure e-Course eXchange (eCX). We will
show how eCX integrates copyright protection
techniques applied in other domains, as well as
encryption techniques to make copyright
protection for e-Course material possible. We
will also show how eCX allows students to
retain a complete copy of the course material
while making it difficult to create or disseminate
copies of the material to other unauthorized
users. As a remark, due to the nature of the
digital data, none of the existing approaches can
provide perfect security regarding these
copyright problems, and it is very unlikely that
such methods exist. However, as long as it is
difficult for students to pass the materials to
other unauthorized users, most of the students
will register for the courses and obtain the
material in a proper manner.
The secure e-Course eXchange (eCX)
The secure e-Course eXchange (eCX) is a set
of software modules designed to work together
to protect the copyright of e-Course material.
These modules are shattered among various
components in PowerEdBuilder ± the
architecture for the SOUL platform. Before
giving a detailed discussion on eCX, we will
give a brief description on PowerEdBuilder.
Figure 1 depicts a system overview of
PowerEdBuilder.
As PowerEdBuilder is designed to be used by
three different parties, namely instructors,
institutes and students, there are three software
components specifically designed for them.
They are the Content Engineering System, the
 eCX: a secure infrastructure for e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau, Lucas C.K. Hui, Bruce Cheung and S.M. Yiu
Figure 1 System overview of PowerEdBuilder
e-Institute, and the e-Learning Platform
respectively.
The Content Engineering System (CES) is
designed for instructors to create e-Course
materials and to launch e-Courses. There is an
eCX sub-module, called the Course Launcher,
residing in CES which is used for launching
e-Courses. The e-Institute is the administration
center of the platform. It is used for handling
student registration, course registration, course
payment, as well as course materials hosting
and downloading. The e-Learning Platform is
the client software installed on the students'
computers. It consists of two software
components: the Personal Classroom and the
Course Downloader. The Personal Classroom
is the software which students use for viewing
the course material. At the core of the Personal
Classroom is the SmartTutor, which is an
intelligent tutoring system built with artificial
intelligent technology, used for assisting
students in their learning process and to provide
guidance to students like a human tutor. The
Course Downloader is used for assisting
students in downloading e-Courses. It uses a
proprietary protocol to communicate with the
e-Institute for registering and downloading
e-Courses. Besides these three major
components, PowerEdBuilder also has a
Communication and Searching Infrastructure
(CSI) providing efficient and secure
communication channels among instructors,
institutes, and students. Lastly, the Secure
e-Course eXchange (eCX) provides
infrastructure for protecting the copyrighted
materials. In this paper, we will only focus on
the eCX related modules. For details about the
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other components of PowerEdBuilder,
please refer to (Yau et al., 2002a; Cheung et al.,
2002a, b). Please also refer to our conference
papers (Yau et al., 2002b, c) for discussions on
various development stages of eCX.
At the core of eCX, there are two important
technologies designed specifically for this
copyright protection system. They are the
Offline-Online Course and the Computer
License.
The offline-online course
As discussed above in the ``Background''
section, we believe that allowing students to
download e-Course material and view them
offline is beneficial to the students. The Offline-
Online Course is a proprietary technology
designed specifically to make this possible.
Ordinary e-Course implementation requires
students to view the course material online, and
the material is stored in the server hosting the
course. On the contrary, the Offline-Online
Course permits students to download the
course material to their own computers and
view the material offline, while making it
difficult to perform unauthorized copying.
Basically, an instructor will compose
e-Course materials using the Content
Engineering System. When the preparation is
done, the instructor can make use of the Course
Launcher, one of the eCX modules situated at
the CES, to launch the newly created e-Course
to an affiliated e-Institute server (please see the
``Course Launching'' section for more details).
The launching process will create two objects
based on the e-Course material. They are the
Course Package and the Course Voucher. The
 eCX: a secure infrastructure for e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau, Lucas C.K. Hui, Bruce Cheung and S.M. Yiu
Course Package contains the online material,
and is encrypted by some symmetrical
encryption algorithm. The Course Voucher
contains different information about the course.
Most importantly, it contains the encryption
key for decrypting the Course Package. This
implies that, for viewing the course material,
one must possess both the Course Package and
the Course Voucher for the course. Once the
e-Course is successfully launched, the Course
Package will be distributed over the network
and could be downloaded by students.
To take an available e-Course, students have
to register for it (please see the ``Course
Registration'' section for details). Students can
download the Course Package, and they must
also obtain the Course Voucher from the
e-Institute server in order to view the course
material. Please note that students are charged
for obtaining the Course Voucher, but not
charged for downloading the Course Package.
The whole process of obtaining the Course
Package and the Course Voucher, as well as the
payment process are all handled by the Course
Downloader software of the e-Learning
Platform.
The design of eCX applies PKI technology ±
Public Key Infrastructure (Stallings, 1999) to
tighten its security. As will be discussed below,
in the next section, all students possess a PKI
key-pair. When the Course Voucher is
delivered from the e-Institute server to the
student, the Course Voucher will be encrypted
using the student's public key, which can only
be decrypted using the student's private key.
When this encrypted Course Voucher is
received by the student, it will be stored
securely on the student's computer in this
encrypted form, which can only be accessed by
the Personal Classroom of the e-Learning
Platform. When the student possesses both the
Course Package and the Course Voucher, he/
she can make use of the Personal Classroom
for viewing the e-Course material offline. The
next subsection will show why the offline
material obtained cannot be easily transferred
to others.
Computer License
The Computer License is a special object that
resides in the student's computer. It is created
when the student installs the e-Learning
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Platform software on to his/her computer.
During the installation, a PKI key-pair is
generated. A hardware profile recording the
hardware configuration of the student's
computer is also generated. The public key of
the key-pair and this hardware profile are both
stored inside the Computer License. Besides,
some personal information about the student is
also stored in this Computer License. This
makes Computer License unique to each
computer. This Computer License is then sent
to the e-Institute server, which the student has
affiliation with. The e-Institute server will
verify this Computer License, assign to it an
expiry date, and sign it digitally. The server
will send the signed Computer License back to
the student's computer. Note that in order to
keep information confidential, the
communication between the server and the
student's computer is done over some secure
communication channel (e.g. the Secure
Socket Layer ± SSL).
When a student invokes the Personal
Classroom software of the e-Learning Platform
for viewing the course material, the Computer
License will first be examined and check if
this invocation is valid. The invocation is valid
only if:
. the Computer License is properly signed by
an e-Institute server;
. the Computer License has not expired; and
. the software is invoked on the computer on
which it was originally installed.
While the first two conditions are trivial, the
third condition requires some elaboration.
During the invocation, a hardware profile will
be generated to reflect the current hardware
configuration of the computer. This hardware
profile is compared with the hardware profile
stored in the Computer License. The third
condition will only be satisfied if the two
hardware profiles match.
When a student has registered for an
e-Course, both the Course Package and the
Course Voucher will be under the student's
possession. As mentioned above, the Course
Package is protected by some symmetric
encryption. Since the encryption key to the
Course Package is contained in the Course
Voucher, the Course Voucher must also be
protected on the student's computer. When
 eCX: a secure infrastructure for e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau, Lucas C.K. Hui, Bruce Cheung and S.M. Yiu
the Course Voucher is received from the
e-Institute, it is encrypted with the computer's
public key using some asymmetric
cryptographic algorithm, such as RSA
(Stallings, 1999). This public key is in fact the
one stored in the Computer License. After this
encrypted Course Voucher is received from the
e-Institute, it will be stored in the student's
computer in this encrypted form. Since it is
encrypted with the computer's public key, it can
only be decrypted by using the computer's
private key. The private key to this key-pair is
stored in some special location on the
computer's hard disk. The only time that a
Course Voucher is not encrypted is when the
student is viewing the course material. Please
refer to the ``Course Viewing'' section for
more details.
The Computer License is vital to the design
of eCX. By comparing the computer's hardware
profile with the one stored on the Computer
License, we can be sure that the Personal
Classroom is invoked on the computer where
the Computer License was originally issued to,
and the material can only be viewed on this
same computer. It prohibits unauthorized users
from using illegal copies of the course material.
Some of the other copyright protection systems
are breakable if the software and the protected
material are all copied on to another computer,
and most will fail if the hard disk is completely
duplicated. However, since eCX employs
Computer License, it would not be vulnerable
to these attacks.
Under some unexpected, yet possible
situations, hard disks of a student's computer may
fail which makes the retrieval of the student's
Computer License not possible. In that case, the
student would have to contact the institute and
request the re-issuing of a new Computer License.
Note that this re-issuing of the Computer License
is totally governed by the institute. Administrative
policy can be applied to limit such re-issuing to
stop students from cheating. Note, also, that
when a Computer License is re-issued to a
student, the old Computer License will be
revoked at the same time.
In addition, the Computer License is
designed to have an expiry date, and the typical
lifetime of a Computer License is six months.
Before a Computer License expires, the
e-Learning Platform software will contact the
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e-Institute server for renewal. By keeping track
of students' Computer Licenses, the institute
will make sure that there is only one valid
Computer License for each student. In a case
where a student cheats and request for re-
issuing Computer License, or the student's
private key is compromised, the old Computer
License would have been revoked and renewal
will not be possible.
Despite all its advantages, the Computer
License approach does have its own
disadvantage. If the hardware configuration of
the system is changed substantially, the
Computer License may be made invalid and the
student needs to contact the institute for
appropriate action. In our current
implementation, we have put in some tolerance
in this hardware configuration verification. Our
experience has been satisfactory and users'
feedback is positive.
Operations of eCX
In this section, we will describe the details of the
key operations, such as course launching,
course registration, and course viewing, of eCX.
Course Launching
As mentioned above, when an e-Course is
launched using the Course Launcher, two
objects, the Course Package and the Course
Voucher, will be created from the e-Course
material. The Course Launcher will send these
two objects through some secure
communication channel (e.g. SSL) to the
Voucher Administrator, which is a module
integrated into the e-Institute (see Figure 2).
Under the Voucher Administrator, the objects
are stored in a database and made available for
students to download.
Course registration
To register for an e-Course, the student has to
invoke the Course Downloader software of the
e-Learning Platform (see Figure 2). The
Course Downloader will establish a secure
communication connection with the Voucher
Administrator (e.g. SSL) to obtain the Course
Voucher. Students are not charged for
downloading the Course Package, but are
charged electronically and automatically for
 eCX: a secure infrastructure for e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau, Lucas C.K. Hui, Bruce Cheung and S.M. Yiu
Figure 2 A detail diagram of PowerEdBuilder (CSI omitted for simplicity)
obtaining the Course Voucher. The Voucher
Administrator will validate the student's
Computer License sent by the Course
Downloader and encrypt the voucher with the
student computer's public key. The encrypted
Course Voucher will be sent to student's
Course Downloader, then stored in the
Voucher Store of the student's machine in its
encrypted form.
Course viewing
After registering for an e-Course, the student
can use the Personal Classroom software of the
e-Learning Platform to view the course
material. Just as described in the ``Computer
License'' section, the Personal Classroom will
only proceed if the invocation validation is
successful. Once it is successfully invoked, the
Personal Classroom will obtain the Course
Voucher from the Voucher Store for decrypting
the Course Package. Note that, both the
Personal Classroom and the Voucher Store
processes are executed on the student's
computer. To guarantee the security of the
system, and to ensure the e-Course material is
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well protected, these two processes will go
through a special authentication process to
mutually authenticate each other.
When this authentication process is done, the
Voucher Store will use the computer's private
key to decrypt the Course Voucher which was
previously encrypted by the e-Institute server
using the computer's public key (please see the
``Course Registration'' section for details).
Afterwards, the Voucher Store will release the
decrypted Course Voucher to the Personal
Classroom where it will be used for decrypting
the Course Package. Note that for security
reasons and performance reasons, the Personal
Classroom will decrypt the course material
from the Course Package in a material-on-
demand fashion.
Trusting hierarchy and operating models
of e-institutes
The trusting hierarchy
PowerEdBuilder is designed so that many
e-Institute servers may exist on the network. A
 eCX: a secure infrastructure for e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau, Lucas C.K. Hui, Bruce Cheung and S.M. Yiu
possible real life example wouud be for
different companies to host their own servers
for in-house training programmes. These
servers, together with the student computers,
form a trusting hierarchy (see Figure 3).
Student computers belong to the lowest level
of the hierarchy, which has the least privilege.
They could be authenticated by checking their
Computer Licenses. The only authority they
have is to digitally sign payment confirmations
for registering e-Courses. The
e-Institute servers belong to the middle level of
the hierarchy. These servers are the Certificate
Authorities (CA) for issuing Computer
Licenses to student computers. Each of these
servers possesses a Server Certificate, which is
used for proving its own identity to others. The
eCX Root Certificate Authority is in the
highest level of the hierarchy. It possesses the
Root Key to the whole PowerEdBuilder
trusting hierarchy, and is the root of the
trusting hierarchy. It signs the Server
Certificate of all of the servers in the
middle level.
Figure 3 Trusting hierarchy of e-institute servers
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The two server models
The eCX is designed to suit the needs of two
different operating models. They are the
Institutional Server Model and the Corporate
Server Model.
The Institutional Server Model is a server
model that is tailored to be used by educational
organizations. All Institutional Servers are
equipped with a Server Certificate signed by the
Root Certificate Authority. They have the
authority of signing and issuing Computer
License for students registered under them.
There can be many servers operating under this
model, and each server is authorized to issue
Computer Licenses. Besides having computer
licenses issued by themselves, these institutional
servers can be configured to honor Computer
Licenses issued by other Institutional Servers.
However, they will never honor Computer
Licenses issued by any Corporate Servers.
An Institutional Server has no limitation as
to the number of ``copies'' of an e-Course that
it can issue to students. The revenue
generated from the course will be split among
 eCX: a secure infrastructure for e-course delivery
Joe C.K. Yau, Lucas C.K. Hui, Bruce Cheung and S.M. Yiu
different parties according to the payment
agreement.
The Corporate Server Model is a server
model that is tailored to be used by business
organizations for corporate training. All
Corporate Servers are equipped with a Server
Certificate signed by the Root Certificate
Authority. They have the authority of signing
and issuing Computer Licenses for students
registered under them (i.e. their own staff).
Servers operating under the Corporate
Server Model function are very much like
those under the Institutional Server Model ±
except for three ways. The first difference is
that a Corporate Server only honors
Computer Licenses issued by itself. It will not
honor any Computer Licenses from any other
servers, regardless if the license is issued by
another Institutional Server or another
Corporate Server. The second difference is
that since a Corporate Server is operated
within the same corporation, it can have a
different mechanism for the payment system.
The course registration may be free for all of
its staff members, or charging according to
cost centers, etc. The third difference is that a
Corporate Server pays the instructor (i.e. the
e-Course provider) at a bulk rate. The
corporate pays the instructor a certain
amount of money for a fixed number of copies
of the e-Course, and the server will be limited
to issue that many copies of the
e-Course. In other words, the server can only
send a limited number of copies of a Course
Voucher to its staff members.
Conclusion
In this paper, we consider the problem of
copyright protection of online learning material
in the domain of e-Courses. We propose a
mechanism, called the Secure e-Course
eXchange (eCX), which allows students to
store a local copy of the material while making
the sharing of the material, with non-registered
students, difficult. The design of eCX is flexible
to fit two operating models, namely the
Institutional Server Model and the Corporate
Server Model. This design has been
implemented in an actual online learning
system, the SOUL platform, for the School of
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Professional and Continuing Education of the
University of Hong Kong.
As one future direction of research,
evaluation on the eCX will be performed
shortly, and the results will be used in the
refinement of eCX and other PowerEdBuilder
components. In fact, there are many other
security issues regarding online learning
systems, such as online submission of
assignments (Luck and Joy, 1999), which are
not addressed in this paper. Therefore, other
future research directions would be to tackle
those security problems.
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Harasim, L. (1999), ``A framework for online learning: the
virtual-U'', IEEE Computer, pp. 44-9.