Incorporating flexible, configurable and scalable security to the education collaborative environments

This paper presents a service that provides security through the technology of Web services. The use of web services to provide security in e-learning systems will complement the features of services developed in language and/or different architectures. Thus, our work is not limited to platforms in which the client (e-learning system) was developed, since this service is provided on a flexible, scalable and configurable way. The proposed service uses public key cryptography, digital signature and secret key cryptography to provide integrity, non-repudiation, confidentiality and authenticity. The main features of the proposed service are presented in this paper, with their employability in a case study for the chat tool for collaborative learning environments, Sakai and Moodle. The completion of the case study is a contribution to the environments above, since the chat tool in these systems does not have security services. The case study shows the proof of concept for the security service presented in this paper.