A Monitoring and Alert System for Shared Computer Laboratories

Abstract

Shared computer laboratories at universities provide essential resources to students, but they are also vulnerable to theft of internal hardware components, such as graphics 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 prototype software-based monitoring and alert system for shared computer workstations. The system uses a client-server architecture in which lightweight clients installed on lab oratory computers send periodic heartbeats and provide information to the server. The server applies context-aware alarm logic to classify events and reduce false alarms. The system was evaluated through scenario-based testing in a laboratory environment. The results show that the system reliably detects hardware component changes and that the context-aware alarm logic reduces false alarms compared to an approach in which every unavailability event triggers an alert. The system was able to distinguish between benign and suspicious events in evaluated scenarios where contextual evidence was available. However, certain situations, such as a single machine losing power, remain inherently ambiguous, as they produce system-level signals identical to those caused by physical tampering.