Security and deployment
This page summarizes AIDRE's security design for campus IT. Licensees receive the full security paper with the administration guide, written so your team can adopt it into a threat model it owns.
How it is deployed
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On your servers
AIDRE is installed by your IT team on a Linux or Windows machine. It needs Python, LibreOffice with its Math component, and pandoc; the handwritten-solutions feature also needs poppler. All four are widely used, actively maintained open-source projects, installed from their official releases or your operating system's package manager. Instructors use AIDRE through a web browser.
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Behind your sign-in
AIDRE has no user accounts of its own. It is designed to sit inside your network or behind your institution's sign-in, through a reverse proxy or single sign-on, and it can be bound to the local machine only so nothing else reaches it directly.
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A private link per job
Each job is reached by its own unguessable link, built from 32 random bytes. AIDRE stores only a hash of each link, never the link itself.
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One job at a time
Jobs wait in a queue and run one at a time. The number of queued jobs and the size of each upload are capped at levels configured by IT staff, and every limit is stated to the person uploading before the job starts.
Protections built in
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Only the files it repairs
AIDRE accepts Word and PowerPoint files for repair, and PDFs only in its two PDF tools; in a folder upload, every other file is left behind before anything is sent. Each Office file is checked before any part of AIDRE opens it, and one that is not a valid package, would expand past fixed size limits, or has a name that tries to escape its folder is refused by name.
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Restricted conversions
Each LibreOffice run uses a fresh, locked-down profile that refuses linked content and macros, and the equation converter runs in pandoc's sandbox mode.
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Documents treated as data
Text sent to the language model is cleaned of hidden characters, and every request instructs the model to treat the document as content to analyze, never as instructions to follow.
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Secrets kept out of logs
Provider keys live in one configuration file, never in code, and every message AIDRE prints passes a redaction step, which a test enforces.
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A locked admin console
The admin console does not exist unless your administrator configures a token. Once configured, it stays locked until the token is entered, and repeated wrong entries trigger a lockout.
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Owner-only storage
The job store is restricted to the account running AIDRE, and uploads and results are deleted on a schedule your administrator sets.
What stays with your team
The network, backups, endpoint protection, encryption in transit and the FERPA determination are your institution's. The security paper lists the questions only your staff can answer, such as which networks may reach the server and where backups of its folders go, so they are decided rather than assumed.