A year long study and joint research at The University of Washington, The University of California, San Diego and University of California Davis, resulted in an Open Source Software to track down missing or stolen laptops. It is being seen as a boon for the government and business officials who have been facing loss of confidential data due to stolen laptops as well as for others who have converted their notebooks into photo and video storage areas.
Named after the Roman Goddess of safe returns, Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party.
What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.
Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. 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. 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.
How it works?
Upon the installation of Adeona on your laptop, encrypted connections to OpenDHT storage server is established. If a laptop is stolen, one can log into OpenDHT and check the location of the laptop through the IP addresses and the Internet nodes, last known and used to connect the lost gadget. The best and the most distinguishing feature of this software highlights its privacy ideas which do not let the Law enforcement agencies or any external individuals to go through the data in one’s laptop.
Thing to ponder over:
- There still remains a question mark over the security of Open Source Security software as even the thieves could work over it for modifications, owing to the fact that its source code is known to all.
- Its major focus is over the hardware and not the data where a valid point lies that if a thief would steal a laptop for data reasons, he might not wait for the thing to be tracked down. His motive of information theft could be achieved in minutes leading him to discard the machine.
Use it
There are downloadable binaries/installers for Linux, Windows and Mac.
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