At the moment I'm testing a lot to detect whether a visiter of a webpage is using remote desktop access.
This is important for e-learning web applications. To make sure the student is working alone on a test.
I'm using php,jquery,javascript (html5) and flash. But can't seem to find a good solution. I found an answer on stackoverflow to use css' @media for color-depth. But that doesn't work.
Does anyone know a way to detect if a visiter of a webpage uses remote access?
It can't be done. The browser has no idea what the computer is doing at operating-system level, or what other software is running.
The reason color-depth doesn't work is that viewing over remote desktop doesn't change the colour depth being rendered by the browser, only what is displayed to the user.
Trying to prevent cheating in this manner is not a good idea. If someone wants to cheat, they'll find a way around any software mechanism you create... it's not that hard! Instead, you risk just making things difficult for users who want to do use the site in an unusual context but for a legitimate reason. There is no substitution for education of your users and, where possible, real human interaction.
Perhaps you could exploit some of the limitations of RDP to make it hard to use or view the site remotely?
Try watching a video over RDP, it almost makes remote access unusable. I don't recommend this, but perhaps you could have a fairly non-distracting constantly changing background video (like here http://www.calm.com/) to the webpage that would make it very bandwidth intensive and difficult to use over RDP?
If you just change the background colours or brightness slightly it might be imperceptible to the normal user too.
Scrolling of pages with background images and fading and transition effects work poorly across RDP also. Perhaps you could consider using those?
