News: Latch plugin for Moodle is out

We have uploaded to GitHub our latest plugin for Moodle. It makes it easier to use Latch technology with this popular e-learning platform. You can download it form here. This is a little “how to” so you can check how easy the integration is.

Prerequisites

Admins have to follow the usual steps if they want to protect Moddle with Latch:

1. Create a developer account if they haven´t it.
2. Create an application with the features they want (one-time password has not been implemented yet for Moodle).
3. Download the plugin.
4. Install and configure the plugin in their Moodle environment.

Steps 1, 2 and 3 are documented on the website of Eleven Paths and step 4 is going to explained in this post.

Moodle plugin is a zip file, copy its contents to the root directory of Moodle.

Moodle root directory

After copying the plugin, Moodle administrator has to access his own account with username and password, and complete the installation.

Confirmation message

To set up the plugin, the administrator should go to the “Manage authentication” section, under the “Site administration – Plugins – Authentication” menu and enable the Latch plugin.

Enabling the plugin

After enabling the plugin, the administrator has to enter the “Application ID” and the “Secret” to the section corresponding to “Latch” under the “Site administration – Plugins – Authentication” menu.

Entering the app ID and the Secret

Latch is now ready to be used and users are ready to pair their acounts. Users with Moodle accounts have to set their own accounts going to “My Profile settings – Edit profile”, access the “Latch” section. Type the token generated on the phone into the text box displayed on the web.

Introduce the token generated by Latch app

A notification will be received on the phone, announcing that the account is already paired.

Notification after successful pairing

Now the user may lock and unlock access to his Moodle account and a notification on his phone will be received, warning about somebody trying to access the account

Notification of an unauthorized access attemp

The database

When Latch is installed in Moodle, Moodle database is set to store the values needed by Latch. Specifically the mdl_config_plugins table stores the Application ID and App Secret.

mdl_config_plugin table with the Application ID an the Secret

The mdl_user_info_data table indicates which user account has been paired with Latch.

mdl_user_info_data table with the users that have already paired their accounts