A new open source tool called Adeona has been released by researchers at two universities in an effort to recover lost or stolen laptops on campus, at airports and elsewhere. Adeona, in fact, is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns.
University of Washington and University of California, San Diego researchers say the tool enables laptop owners to track the whereabouts of their Windows, Apple and Linux machines without letting anyone else know. Once Adeona is loaded on a machine, it will every so often send scrambled information such as IP address to OpenDHT, a free online storage network, that can be used to determine a laptop’s general location. On Macs, Adeona can even exploit the internal camera to take pictures to send to the OpenDHT server.
The information could then be used by cops to try to track down the machine.
“We wanted to build a tool that allows you to track the location of your laptop but at the same time doesn’t allow someone else to track you,” said Tadayoshi Kohno, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering, in a statement. “Typically when you create a forensics trail, you leave breadcrumbs that you can see, but so can everyone else. We’ve created a private forensics trail where only you can see those breadcrumbs.”
Commercial laptop tracking offerings include those from Absolute Software. Such offerings also exist for tracking down missing tapes.
Adeona, which has had 50K-plus downloads, grew out of research into privacy protection.
Next up? Maybe an iPhone version.
