After two failed attempts of rolling out a network registration requirement, the Office of Information Technology hopes that the third time’s a charm.
The OIT department at OU is working with the Network Access Control subcommittee of the Faculty Technology Advisory Group in testing network registration.
Registration requires both OU-owned and privately owned computers or devices by all students and faculty to be registered if they wish to use the college’s wireless or wired network.
Information Technology Communications Manager Sean O’Malley said there is no firm rollout plan at this time for the registration requirement. The department has just now begun to look at the project, which was canceled in 2008 because of technical problems.
“We still have a lot of testing to do before we know if this solution is even viable, from a technical standpoint,” O’Malley said. “The other two times, the solutions that were presented never made it out of testing, and this could happen again.”
The benefits to registration are preventing security threats or cyber attacks and keeping people not associated with the university from gobbling up OU’s bandwidth for their personal purposes, O’Malley said.
Alexis Lurie, a freshman studying marketing, said she hadn’t heard of the network registration requirement and is hesitant about the new policy.
“I don’t understand why we would have to register our computers and devices through the university,” Lurie said.
OU’s OIT has been flagged by security consultants for being in violation of federal laws, which prohibit open access to networks, according to O’Malley.
“Network registration is one of the things that we need to do to make sure we are appropriately secure and fitting in with the federal regulations,” O’Malley said.
In addition to the network-registration requirement, OIT is also pushing out Nessus computer scans to registered devices to identify operating-system vulnerabilities, virus infections and other potential security risks.
“The scans try and identify a bunch of known vulnerabilities on a computer; if it finds one of them open, it lets us know that a computer is compromised or capable of being compromised,” O’Malley said. “The scans are an equivalent to someone walking up to a house and checking to see if any windows are broken or if any doors are propped open.”
Some OU students are concerned as to what exactly these periodic scans can access.
“I understand where they are coming from to see if people have infected computers,” said Jeanna Unrue, a first-year graduate student studying physical therapy. “My concern is opening my computer to them.”
O’Malley emphasized that OIT has no interest in snooping into people’s computers and looking through their hard drives.
“In general, people’s reaction to the scans is to be concerned about their privacy online,” O’Malley said. “Network registration does not allow or give us backdoor access to scan the contents of your hard drives. All we end up with is a list, which will be stored on a secure system, of which devices belong to which person.”
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