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Protecting Dartmouth from Digital Intruders
By Ed Gray '67
Recent computer security breaches at colleges and universities throughout
the country, Dartmouth included, have spurred campus network administrators to
tighten up the log-on procedures for its 10,000 users. With an open-access,
campus-wide wireless network and as many as 20,000 active IP addresses that
identify network users, a simple password that can be stolen by somebody
guessing your dog's name is no longer sufficient to keep digital intruders at
bay.
 "The hackers are more sophisticated than they used to be," says
Brad Noblet, the College's director of technical services. "We've had to
increase our security budget and deploy new technology. Hackers write assembly
language programs that are hidden from the directory, and therefore, from a
program scanning the directory. We had cases where we patched a machine,
thought we had fixed the problem, and then found later, the virus was deeper in
the machine."
That new technology includes both hardware and software. Each student in the
Class of 2008 was issued, upon arrival in Hanover, an Aladdin eToken, a
house-key-sized authentication device that fits into the USB port of any
computer. Activated by the user's typed-in password, the eToken then issues a
pre-encoded digital certificate to the network, allowing the user full
access. The network will still be open to anyone who wants to use it for
external Internet access, but to get at Dartmouth-specific areas like grades,
administrative files, and personal data, an eToken and password will be
required starting sometime this fall. Human resources and medical records,
already well protected, will require even more steps than they do now.
To get help deploying the new system, Noblet didn't have to look far.
Dartmouth's own PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) Lab, formed in 2001 with
funding from the Mellon Foundation, has been working to develop the use of
exactly this sort of access control in academic computing throughout the
country. The fit was a natural.
"There are three factors of personal identification for security," explains
Larry Levine, former chief information officer and associate provost for
information technology at Dartmouth College. "Something you know: a password.
Something you have: an ATM card — or in this case, an eToken. And something you
are. That third level is biometrics and we're not going there now."
Where Levine and Noblet are going is inside the computers themselves, from
students' laptops to the main servers themselves. The Sygate Security Agent,
already installed in about 2,000 Windows computers on campus, has been adapted
to run in conjunction with a central server that does not allow any malicious
program to be run on any connected machine. The user of an infected computer
will have to bring it into Computing Services to have it cleaned off line. And,
if a worm or Trojan gets identified on one Sygate-connected computer, the
server will then block it on all the rest.
"Sygate will be deployed campus-wide this fall, along with eTokens in all
the Windows machines," says Noblet. "They're still cooking the software for the
Macintosh and Linux machines, but they'll be part of the full roll out."
For more information related to this topic, see:
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