Open source Adeona tracks stolen laptops
p2pnet news view Security | Open Source:- If you’ve ever had your laptop and its priceless data go missing, Adeona may be a way to stop it from happening again,
It says it’s created the first GPLv2 licensed system that doesn’t rely on a proprietary, central service for tracking down lost or stolen laptops.
Install Adeona on your laptop and go, it says, emphasising the Mac OS X version can also capture pictures of the thief using the built-in iSight camera and the freeware tool isightcapture.
Byt, “Like your location information, these images are privacy-protected so that only the laptop owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can access them,” it proimises.
“Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings,” says the company. No one besides the owner, or an agent, can use Adeona to track a laptop, it says.
Adeona is designed to use the OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on the laptop and uses a community-based remote storage facility, “ensuring retrievability of recent location updates”.
“The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location,” says the company, going on:
“The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.”
With current proprietary tracking systems, “users sacrifice location privacy,” states Adeona.
“Indeed, even while the device is still in the rightful owner’s possession, the tracking system is keeping tabs on the locations it (and its owner) visit. Even worse, with some commercial products, even outsiders (parties not affiliated with the tracking provider) can ‘piggy-back’ on the tracking system’s Internet traffic to uncover a mobile device user’s private information and/or locations visited.
It can also be installed on desktop computers, servers —- “in case someone breaks into your server room and steals them”.
Mobile devices aren’t yet supported, “but we are looking into providing support here, as well,” says Adeona.
Adeona is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns and flows from research started at the University of Washington, with participants now also at the University of California San Diego and the University of California Davis, says the site, adding:
“The foundations of the Adeona design — and an analysis of its security and privacy properties — are published in a research paper at the 2008 USENIX Security Symposium.”
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