How do I lockdown the web on a kiosk?

Question

I am looking to add a couple of kiosks to a plant location, at the request of HR, to allow applicants to come in and apply on the website.  I need to lock it down so that the users can only access the one set of pages to do the application and not wander off into the world wide web.  What would be the best way to do this?  We use Cisco Umbrella to monitor our webspace, is there a tool that will allow me to do it there?

Daniel Ebers · Answer

We did a installation like this in the past for a school canteen. If you are not going to use a commercial solution which is available on the commercial market for a setup like you have a demand for is not that easy when looking into details.

Of course, locking down the browser to keep the user on a predefined set of webpages might be easy.

In case the system is unattended we saw the following challenges:

- can users start other application except the browser (we don't wanted them playing Solitaire on the machines)
- are USB ports safe?
- is the boot environment safe (not to let them boot a live linux system or so)
- is the environment safe at all (do we need to lock the system to a wall - or not)?

We managed (I think so...) to cover the most common scenarios - with available settings of the system, without the need of spending money. But it was a reasonable effort.

In your case it _might_ be a bit less effort as an applicant is not trying to play around with the system (hopefully!) whereas the kids definitely tried to.

For commercial solutions I cannot give any advise, sorry. They might be much easiert to setup, though.

Cheers,
Daniel

Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] · Answer

Most modern operating systems have a built-in host-based firewall.  You could create an outbound rule that only allows outbound traffic to the Jira server IP address and drop all other outbound connections. That's easy and free.  This is a question for your operating system, though.  It really has nothing to do with Jira.