How to Build a Kiosk using Free Tools

Set­ting up a secure pub­lic machine for demon­stra­tion pur­poses can be tricky. This is infor­ma­tion freely avail­able; how­ever, when I first began this task, it was very dif­fi­cult to get a straight answer on the do’s and don’ts.

Please Note: This is only an effec­tive way if you want to uti­lize a web-based pre­sen­ta­tion or application.

Around a year ago, a client of ours sent two brand spankin’ new 24” iMac’s and wanted to use them as secure browsers. So, we got to work on fig­ur­ing out how to imple­ment this sort of thing on the Mac plat­form. Our com­pany before used to build .NET appli­ca­tions spe­cific to an event and win­dows based machine; this process wasn’t the most stream­lined, see­ing as how a sim­ple web app for data cap­ture would work just as well. So after some search­ing, I found a method that would work out per­fectly for this and it’s even cross plat­form compatible!

Step 1:
Down­load Opera’s lat­est and great­est. (opens in a new window)

Step 2:
Open up Opera and get into the set­tings preferences.

Under the Gen­eral Tab set your Start­ing Pref­er­ence (Start with home page). Then set the home page appro­pri­ate to your event; I chose a local file to accom­plish this.

Then click the Wand Tab and uncheck the “Let the Wand remem­ber pass­words” box.

Now head over to the Advanced Tab and find Secu­rity (high­lighted) and click Set Mas­ter Pass­word …
This will ensure that you can get the com­puter out of Kiosk mode in order to uti­lize it later on as a com­puter again. So this step is fairly important!

Under the same Advanced Tab you need to locate Short­cuts and uncheck the Enable mouse ges­tures. This will pre­vent any­one who may know Opera mouse ges­tures from being able to try any funny business.

Step 3:
Now that those set­tings are out of the way, we can move into the more nitty gritty stuff. As we are using Mac as an exam­ple, go ahead and fire up Script Editor.app from your Applications/Applescript folder. This will be a very basic script, one line of code.

do shell script "/Applications/Opera.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera -kioskmode -noexit"

Of course if you stuck Opera.app into another folder, the part in between the ” may slightly differ.

Save that script some­where in case you want to edit it some­time, then do a Save As … You will select Appli­ca­tion as the File For­mat. I usu­ally save some­thing like that onto the Desk­top so an Event Staffer can locate it easily.

So is that it? Not quite, but we’re close. For it to actu­ally be secure, you still need to fil­ter out sites, or in a bet­ter case, only allow cer­tain ones block­ing all others.

Step 4:
Since Opera has been run, there will now be an urlfilter.ini file that should be edited. On the Mac you can find this at: /Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences/ if the urlfilter.ini file is NOT in there, you need to cre­ate it (some­times it is and some­times it isn’t, no rhyme or rea­son to it). Okay, so you have the file, let’s open it up in a text edi­tor and fill it with some­thing sim­i­lar to below.

Opera Preferences version 2.1
; Do not edit this file while Opera is running
; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding

[prefs]
prioritize excludelist=0

[include]
file://localhost/Users/user/Sites/kiosk*
*.somewhereelse.com*
*.thatsite.net*

[exclude]
*

The *.domain.com* are sites that you will allow the browser to visit and the * are there as wild­cards, in case one of those sites sends the user to a dif­fer­ent sub­do­main or folder.

Step 5:
You just have to set up the com­puter at that point to auto­mat­i­cally log in as the Kiosk User (or what­ever user you just set this up for) and ensure that they have the Apple­script Appli­ca­tion in their Login Items path.

There are a lot more rules that can be applied; how­ever, these should take care of most needs for most cir­cum­stances. If you are doing some­thing for the mil­i­tary or another gov­ern­ment branch, you may want to write an actual application.