A Monitoring and Alert System for Shared Computer Laboratories

Sammanfattning

Shared computer laboratories at universities provide essential resources to students,but they are also vulnerable to theft of internal hardware components, such asgraphics cards, memory modules, and storage devices. Detecting such thefts is challenging because many benign events, including maintenance, configuration changes,and temporary network issues, can produce symptoms similar to physical tampering. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a prototypesoftware-based monitoring and alert system for shared computer workstations. Thesystem uses a client-server architecture in which lightweight clients installed on laboratory computers send periodic heartbeats and provide information to the server.The server applies context-aware alarm logic to classify events and reduce falsealarms. The system was evaluated through scenario-based testing in a laboratoryenvironment. The results show that the system reliably detects hardware componentchanges and that the context-aware alarm logic reduces false alarms compared to anapproach in which every unavailability event triggers an alert. The system was ableto distinguish between benign and suspicious events in evaluated scenarios wherecontextual evidence was available. However, certain situations, such as a singlemachine losing power, remain inherently ambiguous, as they produce system-levelsignals identical to those caused by physical tampering.