Adeona, Free Laptop-Tracking Software

TWO students from University of California and University of Washington, and their professors have developed an open-source system for tracking the location of a lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central tracking service. The open-source developers of Adeona are Ph.D. students Gabriel Maganis and Thomas Ristenpart, and professors Tadayoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy. They cite two major differences between Adeona and a commercial product.

Adeona can be downloaded free of charge. Adeona's developers say it preserves privacy, because no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop.

"Unfortunately, with current proprietary tracking systems, users sacrifice location privacy," say the software's creators. "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) visits. 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 user's private information and locations visited."

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 software 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 not only to encrypt the location data, but also to ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable..

Source: http://www.eschoolnews.com