The design and the security concept of a collaborative whiteboard

  • Authors:

  • W Geyer;R Weis

  • Affiliations:

  • Praktische Informatik IV, University of Mannheim, L 15, 16, D-68131 Mannheim, Germany;Praktische Informatik IV, University of Mannheim, L 15, 16, D-68131 Mannheim, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

This paper presents the design and the security concept of the digital lecture board, an enhanced whiteboard tailored to the specific needs of collaborative types of work, for instance, in computer-based distance education. The development of the digital lecture board emerged from our experiences with synchronous, computer-based distance education in the TeleTeaching projects of the University of Mannheim. For almost four years, we have been using video conferencing tools for transmitting lectures and seminars. These tools prove to be far from optimal for this purpose since they are not powerful enough to support team work, not flexible enough for the use of media, and somewhat difficult to handle for non-experts. Security issues such as authentication, secure key exchange, and fast symmetric encryption are almost completely neglected, even though security is extremely important to allow for confidential, private sessions, and billing. We discuss shortcomings of existing video conferencing tools and describe features we had in mind while designing the digital lecture board. We then present our security concept that is a user-oriented approach that takes into account the specific security requirements of different user groups. We also cover implementation issues of the current prototype.