Using a Raspberry Pi for Proctorio

30 Jan 2021

For one of my classes I am required to take a short weekly exam via Proctorio. There’s been some controversy surrounding this software. Although it claims it’s trustworthy, it’s not open-source, so no one can verify their claims. So naturally, I was reluctant to install it on my primary machine. Enter: the spare raspberry pi I have sitting around.

All it took was a USB webcam hooked up to a raspberry pi. For this project I wanted to maximize comparability, so I chose stock Ubuntu. I installed Chromium and the Proctorio plugin, and I was all set.

Proctorio slowed my machine to a crawl, but it didn’t effect taking my test that much. The I only time this was annoying was when I realized halfway through that I needed to switch my keyboard layout.

I wish I didn’t have to use Proctorio. I don’t trust them. They say my information is encrypted, but they also do some kind of eye tracking to flag suspicious behavior. (Among other metrics.) Is this computation being run on my machine? This seems more like a job that would get farmed off to a server somewhere. in that case, it could not be encrypted.

That is just some speculation. Perhaps they really are a reputable company that I can trust with my data. But until I can verify that myself, I’ll keep it on a burner computer that I can fully wipe once I’m done.