A safe authentication system for distance education

ABSTRACT The importance of correctly identifying a student in a distance learning environment comes from the necessity to avoid fraud and the fact that the student plays the central role in this kind of learning process claims that the student should be correctly assessed, identified, and authenticated. The Learning Management Systems available nowadays provides only the user authentication engine based on username/password, which increases the susceptibility to fraud, when the authentication certainty level about the actual user, given for this mechanism, is practically void. In this article we proposed the safe and fast approach for authentication system for distance learning. The certification methods of face recognition were adopted in proposed system. The high recognition rate of the implemented system in four cities of Iran shows that the distance education systems are more secure and reliable than the traditional authentication system, and as a result, promote the development of distance education, in future.© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 22:593–603, 2014; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae ; DOI 10.1002/cae.20583