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By Joerg Abendroth, Vasiliki Liagkou, Apostolis Pyrgelis, Christoforos Raptopoulos, Ahmad Sabouri, Eva Schlehahn, Yannis Stamatiou, Harald Zwingelberg

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Abstract

This deliverable describes the context as well as the details and requirements of the usage scenarios of the ABC4Trust pilot system that will give the opportunity to university students to remotely evaluate courses they have attended in the semester. The student’s eligibility will be checked using Privacy-ABCs and smart card technology while their anonymity will be protected throughout as well as after the evaluation period. The pilot’s main goal is to provide feedback to Privacy-ABC technology developers as well as to pave the way towards a more general usage of this technology among members of the educational community in Greece.

Executive Summary

This deliverable describes one of the two pilots of the ABC4Trust project which will be conducted in the context of WP7: University course evaluations by certified students. The goal of the pilot is to use privacy enhancing Attribute-based Credentials (Privacy-ABCs) that will allow University students to anonymously participate in an online course evaluation at the end of the semester.

The pilot addresses the special challenge that for important and influential results of a poll to be correct and credible, the privacy of the people expressing their opinion must be preserved. ABC technology will guarantee than no information is sent to the system in the first place, which can later be used to identify the student who submits the evaluation. At the same time, the pilot system will guarantee that only eligible students can have access to the evaluation of a course. That is, the system must first verify that a student (i) is enrolled in the university, (ii) has registered to the course and (iii) has attended most of the lectures of that course. To satisfy the above requirements, each student obtains a smart card, which is used to receive Privacy-ABCs, issued by the university. These credentials will be used by students at the end of the semester to prove the desirable properties, e.g. verify their enrolment in the university and the course they have registered for, without revealing their identity. The students utilize the same smart card to anonymously collect evidence for their class attendance throughout the semester by waving the card in front of a contactless smart card reader installed in the lecture room. At the end of semester, they anonymously authenticate from their PCs to the online evaluation page of the corresponding course, by combining the credentials they have collected.

This deliverable gives the details behind the above general pilot context description and provides details on how the pilot requirements given in deliverable D5.1 will be transformed into a fully operational system that will support the pilot scenarios. More specifically, in this deliverable we provide the details of the university pilot environment, the chosen use cases and the ABC functionalities required for their implementation, the pilot architectural elements, their interactions, and impact of the pilot as well as the relevant legal considerations. Finally, in the appendix, we provide a user manual that will be distributed to the students in order to acquaint them with the pilot and its goals.

Our pilot has as its utmost goal to provide, through the implementation of the course evaluation system end its deployment by the students, feedback to the ABC technology developers on the user acceptance and usability of the technology, from the user’s point of view as well as feedback on the ease of development from the developers’ point of view. The course evaluation for certified students will provide several additional properties via ABC technologies to students like University registration, revocation authority, storing and backing up their attendance information.

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