Distributed Registration and Key Distribution for Online Universities

In this paper we focus on the role of universities in distance education and teleteaching. We argue that universities have to cooperate with commercial service providers to disseminate lectures to a wide audience, and that this cooperation requires new techniques with regard to the registration, validation, and certiication of the parties involved, such as professors, service providers, and students. We also propose a technique that can be used in distance education and teleteaching to set up and run online universities. The technique has been named DiRK, an acronym derived from Distributed Registration and Key distribution. It can be used in a conferencing system, such as the Internet Multi-cast Backbone (MBone), to handle the registration of participants and the distribution of session keys in a decentralized and fully distributed way. DiRK is being prototyped in a session registration tool (srt) for the MBone. The srt will serve as a starting-point to evaluate and further enhance DiRK, as well as to develop similar tools that can be used in distance education and teleteaching to set up and run online universities.