A Classification of Threats to Remote Online Examinations

Abstract

Summative online examinations is a high stake process which faces many security threats. The lack of face-toface interaction, monitoring or invigilation motivates many threats, which includes intrusion by hackers and collusion by students. This paper is based on a survey of literature to present a threat classification using security abuse case scenarios. Collusion is one of the challenging threats, when a student invites a third party collaborator to impersonate or aid a student to take an online test. While mitigation of all types of threats is important, the risk of collusion is increasingly challenging because it is difficult to detect such attacks.