Securing Training Objects and Records Management

Delivery of training materials via the Web is rapidly becoming an essential method of delivering training in an efficient and cost-effective manner, both in the military and civilian environments. Widely dispersed training audiences, however, require various levels of access control to training materials, particularly with respect to sensitive training materials or high-stakes testing/training scenarios. Although authentication tokens such as smart cards and biometrics can provide stronger authentication, access control, and audit trail logging, at this point there is no standardized way to integrate strong authentication tokens with the Learning Management Systems that are used to manage, track, and deliver Web-based distributed training. This proposal addresses two challenges of securing Web-based distributed training content: The first is to determine the feasibility of integrating strong authentication and access-control tokens, in a standardized manner, to SCORM-compliant training packages, as launched and tracked by a Learning Management System (LMS). The second challenge is to assess the strong access-control needs of current Department of Defense distributed training programs and thereby determine the access-control requirements for current and future advanced distributed training activities.