Microsoft offers security to prevent CBSE Paper leaks

Earlier in the year, the class 10 mathematics paper and the class 12 economics paper were leaked.

This caused the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to come under some harsh criticism about the safety of its papers.

Both parents and students were outraged at the incident.

The CBSE has 20,299 schools in the country, so they felt the need to spring into action in order to protect the equal opportunities of every student.

To address the criticisms, the CBSE has partnered with Microsoft to prevent such paper leaks from ever happening again.

In three months, they developed an encrypted security solution for digital question papers for the board.

Anil Bhansali, the Managing Director of Microsoft India (R&D) and the Corporate Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise, explained the workings of the security solution.

He said that the system makes question papers completely leak-proof until 30 minutes before the beginning of the examinations.

Bhansali added that the system allows easy traceability if the question papers get leaked after they are allowed to be downloaded.

The system allows traceability because the question papers for every center are watermarked. The new security solution is currently having its pilot run. Microsoft has said that the solution passed its first test with flying colors.

The security system allows the controller of an examination to track the entire process by using a software solution built on Office 365 and Windows 10.

Examiners must identify themselves before they are allowed to download the examination papers. There are several options for the authentication processes.

The process can come in the form of a One-Time Password (OTP), a biometric process, or even an Aadhaar-based process.

The solution also leverages features in Office 365 that watermark and encrypt the examination papers. Watermarks have the code of their individual center imprinted on them, which allows for localization.

This localization allows for traceability in case of a paper leak. Not only will this security system prevent future leaks of examination papers, but it will also save time and effort for examination administrators.

Image Reference: NDTV