Towards Secure e-Learning Applications: a Multiagent Platform

Abstract

This paper presents some results in the intersection of three technological fields: e-learning, multiagent systems, and standards to improve the development of secure systems. There is a consensus that security is a critical issue for distributed, highly interactive and open learning environments. While a lot of effort in the e-learning domain has been put into delivering infrastructure and providing content, security issues have hardly ever been considered. Agent oriented methodologies may bring benefits to the conception of multiagent systems, since they gradually are incorporating specifications for general security mechanisms (FIPA standards). Concerning the specification of security requirements for e-learning environments, extended formalisms (such as security use cases) appear as proper modeling tools. The topics covered by this paper converge to the implementation of a multiagent platform (the PMA3), which constitutes an open distributed infrastructure addressing important security issues. PMA3 has been used in the development of elearning environments. The paper concludes with an outlook to ongoing research efforts related to security requirements for e-learning applications.