Formidable Filtering

Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Ashley Roe

           

In school systems throughout the U.S., the Internet has become a uniform learning tool used by students in the classroom and at home. Trussville City Schools, a 4,150-student, four-school district outside of Birmingham, Ala., is currently building and incorporating a digital curriculum into teacher lesson plans. Shawn Nutting, director of technology for the school system, says it was easy to make the decision to upgrade the school's technology program for the benefit of its students. “Our teachers already undergo a lot of professional training in curriculum and integration, and we felt like we needed to offer this professionalism to every student,” he says. “Since they already have an interest in using the computer after school, we thought ‘why not take that interest and put it into the classroom?'”

In 2005, the department issued 300 individual laptops to Trussville City School teachers to use for checking e-mail, creating and researching Internet-specific assignments and updating lesson plans viewable by parents online. Soon, all students attending the 6th through 12th grades will be issued a school-sponsored laptop for their use in the classroom and at home. With so many machines in use by different user groups, the department needed to find a security program that could accommodate multiple user profiles and set permissions for each group. Nutting terms it “redesigning the school's digital freedom,” which refers to giving teachers open access to Internet sites and programs while limiting student access to only appropriate programs and Web sites relevant to their education. “I want my staff to have the freedom to access the programs they need,” Nutting says. “Students are ultimately the group we have to protect from bad things on the Internet.” In addition, Nutting was searching for a program that could protect the network from unwanted programs such as spyware and viruses and facilitate compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which mandates school protection measures for minors using the Internet. Trussville City Schools found its answer in Sanctuary Application Control from SecureWave, Luxembourg. The company's U.S. headquarters is located in Herndon, Va.

Previously, the IT department was using an open-source Web content filter installed on a Linux operating system. “Access was an all-or-nothing scenario with that program,” Nutting says, explaining that staff Internet usage operated under the same access rules granted to students. In order to gain access to blocked sites, teachers and staff filled out a Work Order Request Form (WORF), and IT specialists unblocked the site per individual request, a process that sometimes took as long as 24 hours. “We found the program limiting,” Nutting says.

After switching to the Microsoft Learning Gateway Framework and implementing the Microsoft SharePoint portal server, Nutting purchased Sanctuary Application Control last spring to manage the school's network security. Sanctuary authorizes applications to run on a network, PC or laptop using a “whitelist” of accessible programs tailored to each user group. During the installation process, Nutting and his staff created specific user groups to represent students, faculty and administrative end-users. Appropriate software programs for each user group were then added to each whitelist, setting permissions in place.

“The whitelist is the doorman in front of the club,” says Dennis Szerszen, senior vice president of SecureWave. “From a security perspective, the user group is an access control list,” he explains. Thus, students, teachers and administrators are only able to access programs and Web sites specifically tied to their user group, thus preventing unauthorized application use and inappropriate Web site views. Programs that are not contained on the whitelist as well as spyware, viruses and other forms of malware are denied by default. The program also features an audit log function, which keeps a record of running, blocked and denied executables for IT department review.

“Sanctuary helped us create a safe computing environment by giving the IT department control over what programs are allowed,” Nutting says. “And instead of completely locking down machines or prohibiting access to the Internet and other programs, we can work with teachers as they develop their own digital curriculums.” As a group that stresses good customer service for the employee and student, the Trussville technology department found that Sanctuary maximized its work philosophy and helped it achieve a 1:1 ratio of computer to user, an initiative it had been working toward. “Because of our customer service approach, we allow way more content than a typical school system would,” Nutting says. “Traditionally, if you allow that type of digital freedom, you will end up with all kinds of unauthorized programs on your network. Sanctuary was our answer to that problem.”

“Security should not be a barrier for technological advances or how we interact with that technology,” Szerszen says. “Trussville City Schools is trying to explore different ways to make new technology available to students while maintaining security and safety. Their philosophy is the perfect match for our product.”

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