Comments for Digital Inquest

Comment on Respondus LockDown Browser by William Conrad

William Conrad — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 03:35:38 +0000

Yet another thank you for this article. Ironically, I’ll be a journalism major, and my Intro to Journalism course requires that quizes and tests be taken using this obnoxious browser. Like you, I’m a Linux user, and only “acquired” a copy of Windows to run under VMWare for the express purpose of using this browser. At the risk of taking a 0% on the first quiz of the year, I am not following these methods to take the quiz on time, and instead emailed my instructor (prior to finding this article) about my difficulties. Like yourself, I am an academically honest person. I am going to forward this article to her, however, as she might be interested. Perhaps there’s an article in your, well, in your article.

Kudos,
LiamC

Comment on Respondus LockDown Browser by Chris Pickett

Chris Pickett — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:20:36 +0000

My situation is similar to the one you described; I use linux, and I don’t want to drive 45 minutes to campus at 1:00 in the morning to take a Spanish quiz.I tried searching for the same error message in ida pro, but ida was unable to find anything. I am not sure if the developers of the Lockdown Browser have changed the way they verify for a vm, or if I am doing something wrong. I am very new to reverse engineering, but I would really like to learn (it seems like a lot more fun than learning Spanish). Do you think you could look at the program again to see if they have changed anything, or perhaps give me a couple pointers to reproduce your results?

Comment on Respondus LockDown Browser by Brian

Brian — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:03:53 +0000

I have not examined how respondus interacts specifically with IE mainly because my issue was getting it to run in a VM plus some other poking around for a presentation on how terrible it is. I’m not sure how blackboard identifies respondus is running – if you could sniff the respondus-to-blackboard communication (probably from memory since most blackboard setups are SSL) you should be able to construct a firefox plugin to emulate the appropriate response. I have some further information I didn’t get around to posting on how to get firefox and other banned programs running by hiding them in the process tree with the fu rootkit among other things. If it’s of interest I could dig up my slides. Honestly, I’d just contact your professor to explain it simply does not work and it should not be that difficult to take an exam.

Comment on Respondus LockDown Browser by Joey Glass

Joey Glass — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:08:35 +0000

i cant get it to run properly on win7. it will open, but it freezes half the time, and it kills my start menu. it wont come back up after i close it. i’m a 4th semester programming student. what do you thing about a firefox plugin to change ff to report itself as being respondus?

Comment on Respondus LockDown Browser by Brian

Brian — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:37:14 +0000

Thank you for reading it, it is always nice to know someone is getting something out of my writing. Unfortunately my work is for research purposes only and because I am a strong proponent of academic honesty I do not provide modified clients for general consumption, only for proof of concept with other researchers. Even if I was not bound ethically, the client is going to have information specific to your university so the client for my university would not work for you. I do, however, strongly oppose the use of this type of software due to its ineffective nature and the difficulty it presents for Linux users – feel free to forward this page to your instructor as it may prove informative for him or her.