Unlocking Respondus LockDown Browser under Linux

There has been a trend among educational institutions to offer more classes online. Letting students do everything from the convenience of their homes can be a very gainful business model, as the schools no longer have to worry about the huge fixed costs associated with paying for the buildings, classroom equipment, student computer equipment and maintenance. There are multiple problems with having a purely online learning experience. First major obstacle comes from a necessity to grade student knowledge. Doing it online is completely wrong, as there is absolutely no way to prevent a student from utilising additional resources (Google,..) while taking a test. All online test in essence become more like an internet search competition.

It is hard for me to justify the popularity of Respondus LockDown Browser among colleges and universities worldwide. It was certainly an oversight on the part of the college staff to adopt a worthless piece of software from Respondus. By using Respondus software, colleges and universities make a clear statement about technical illiteracy of their staff. All of the controls implemented in the LockDown browser can be easily circumvented by using a Linux system. I suspect that a large percentage of users are either using a second computer, or have already figured out how to run Respondus in a virtual environment.

Here are the steps I have followed that allowed me to run LockDown Browser version 1.0.4.28 under Linux. First, you need to have Wine installed. I have gotten version 1.3.24 from Fedora repos. At this point you have a very basic installation of Wine without any Microsoft fonts. My text fields and menus did not look correct. In order to fix the font issue, I have installed several fonts from the Core Fonts project. Next, I made sure that Wine is trying to emulate Windows 7 by going to: Wine Configuration -> Applications Tab -> Windows Version -> Windows 7. At that point, I just started the LockDownSFX.exe file in Wine. The installer will complain about Wine Gecko package not installed. Go ahead and agree to install it. At the end of the installation I have gotten a warning about FPSPR70.ocx not available. This warning can be ignored. After the installer finished, I rebooted Wine using the appropriate "Wine Boot" menu link and then started the "browser".

Lockdown Browser that I have tried was based on Wine Internet Explorer 8. In fact the browser was reporting a "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Win32)" user agent string. You can load the pure standalone Wine IE by opening Wine File -> Click on C drive -> Program Files -> Internet Explorer -> Double click iexplore.exe. Wine IE8 looks like a browser from 1990s, but it offers the basic functionality of IE8 and is even capable of rendering SVG files. Respondus is in essence taking over Wine IE by disabling tool-bars, navigation bars, and right mouse clicks. Beyond that, it is unable to prevent you from multitasking and taking screen-shots. Every time LockDown Browser is loaded, it tires to authenticate itself by dialling to respondus.com/lockserver10/ls10.php. Once the browser certificate is verified, it redirects to the appropriate school website.