Creeva’s World 2.0

Recently I’ve been put forth to design a kiosk solu­tion for our inter­nal envi­ron­ment.   This is the sec­ond part of my kiosk series which is going to exam­ine test­ing and deploy­ment of such a sys­tem.  To read the first sec­tion go to Part One — Choices For Your Envi­ron­ment.

Kiosk Sys­tem Man­age­ment Strategy

There are mul­ti­ple issues involved with man­ag­ing a “kiosk sys­tem”.   We have to look at the prob­lems we will face whether they are con­sid­ered to be inter­nal or exter­nal.  From a secu­rity and man­age­ment scope of this doc­u­ment we are going to assume they are located on the com­pany guest net­work.  If the machines are located within the inter­nal net­work the cur­rent main­te­nance pro­ce­dures will apply.

While this is still in the design period the final abil­i­ties of both the kiosk sys­tem and the where it falls have not been decided upon.   Until another strat­egy is decided upon we are going to assume that these sys­tems will be a mem­ber of the domain.

Hot­fix­ing and Patch­ing: Within the inter­nal net­work we cur­rently use a mix­ture of WSUS, SMS, and Antivirus servers to keep com­put­ers up to date.   Some­thing sim­i­lar would have to be repli­cated either on the guest or DMZ net­work.   If it is located on the DMZ net­work con­trols would have to be in place that the com­mu­ni­ca­tion is pushed to the client for updates instead of the client pulling the infor­ma­tion.  If the infor­ma­tion absolutely must be pulled, this will be addressed in the sec­tion below titled “Secur­ing Connections”.

Break/Fix Issues: Next to the com­puter there will have to be a phone located so users can report any issues that a kiosk should have.   Upon receiv­ing the call and log­ging it, nor­mal break/fix pro­ce­dures would apply.

Remote Desk­top: Going from the DMZ to the guest net­work we should be able to RDP into the kiosk unit.

Remote Mon­i­tor­ing: For the best secu­rity stand­point all of these units should include full audit­ing.   The audit trail could be main­tained locally with a remote server from the DMZ pulling in the logs via either a script or an off the shelf util­ity designed for pulling log files off of the machine.

Uti­liza­tion Report: Sim­i­lar to the Audit log we can get a util­ity that mon­i­tors the uti­liza­tion with these units and pull them into the inter­nal net­work.  This can be done after track­ing down a third party pro­gram that allows for uti­liza­tion mon­i­tor­ing or by pars­ing the audit log and turn­ing that into a uti­liza­tion report.

Seat Type: A new seat type would have to be estab­lished to accom­mo­date the addi­tional costs incurred from the envi­ron­ment set up and main­te­nance of these units includ­ing but not lim­ited the addi­tional costs pos­si­bly incurred by hav­ing a phone nearby to inform the help desk of any issues.

Secu­rity Plan: A new secu­rity plan would have to be estab­lished since there will con­fig­u­ra­tion set­tings that do not fit into the cur­rent secu­rity plans that the com­pany has estab­lished.  While these will fall under a site secu­rity plan, none of our exist­ing would not be able to fit these sys­tems under their con­fig­u­ra­tion options.

Pri­vacy Con­trols: Depend­ing on the kiosk solu­tion we go with – whether it be a login based solu­tion where they have a full appli­ca­tion suite or a web kiosk some­thing must be done to main­tain user pri­vacy.   After an inac­tiv­ity time (amount to be spec­i­fied later) which would either clear the process from mem­ory or log the user out of the kiosk com­pletely depend­ing on which kiosk method we are using in a cou­ple meth­ods. One would be an off the shelf soft­ware prod­uct to this, at this point I would assume we would use all of their pri­vacy and uti­liza­tion reports. Another option would be to setup a script to kill the process or auto­mat­i­cally log out the user and uti­lize the screen­saver in the kiosk to run this func­tion­al­ity and mon­i­tor idle time.

Secur­ing Con­nec­tions: If the machines must pull infor­ma­tion from the machines in the DMZ, then the best method would be to uti­lize IPSEC.  This would limit the amount of ports needed and allow us to lock­down com­mu­ni­ca­tion to only the spe­cific server that the kiosk would need to talk to.