Int. J. High Performance Computing and Networking, Vol. 3, Nos. 5/6, 2005 395 Copyright © 2005 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Context-aware privacy and security agents for distance education 1 George Yee* and Larry Korba National Research Council Canada, Institute for Information Technology, 1200 Montreal Road, Building M-50, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0R6 Canada Fax: 1 613 952 7151 E-mail: george.yee@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca E-mail: larry.korba@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca Website: http://www.iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/ *Corresponding author Nigel H. Lin and Timothy K. Shih Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, Tamsui, Taipei Hsien, Taiwan 251, ROC Fax: 886 2 26209749 E-mail: nigel@mail.topwise.com E-mail: tshih@cs.tku.edu.tw Website: http://www.mine.tku.edu.tw/chinese/teacher/tshih.htm Abstract: Although distance education applications have been widely deployed, not many of them provide privacy and security for their users. Most of them only provide access control by requesting a user id and password. In a recent paper for AINA (Lin et al., 2004), we conveyed the importance of privacy and security for distance education and showed how they can be provided. In this paper, we present an extension of that work for the use of context-aware agents that can provide privacy and security for distance education applications in an intelligent manner based on the user’s interaction context. Our agents are based on an agent framework adapted from IEEE P1484.1/D9: the Learning Technology Systems Architecture (LTSA) (IEEE, 2004). Keywords: agents; distance education; e-learning; privacy; security. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Yee, G., Korba, L., Lin, N.H. and Shih, T.K. (2005) ‘Context-aware privacy and security agents for distance education’, Int. J. High Performance Computing and Networking, Vol. 3, Nos. 5/6, pp.395–404. Biographical notes: George Yee is a Senior Scientist in the Information Security Group, Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council Canada (NRC). Prior to joining the NRC in late 2001, he spent over 20 years at Bell-Northern Research and Nortel Networks. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he is now an Adjunct Research Professor. He is a senior member of IEEE, and member of ACM and Professional Engineers Ontario. His research interests include security and privacy for e-services, using software agents to enhance reliability, security, and privacy, and engineering software for reliability, security, and performance. Larry Korba is the Group Leader of the Information Security Group of the National Research Council Canada in the Institute for Information Technology. He is currently involved in several projects related to security and privacy. His research interests include privacy protection, network security, and computer supported collaborative work.