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.
Adeona has three main properties:
- Private:
Adeona uses state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that
the owner is the only party that can use the
system to reveal the locations visited by a device. - Reliable:
Adeona uses a community-based remote storage facility, ensuring
retrievability of recent location updates. - Open source and free:
Adeona’s software is licensed under GPLv2. While your locations
are secret, the tracking system’s design is not.
The Mac OS X version also has an option to capture pictures of
the laptop user or thief using the built-in iSight camera and the
freeware tool isightcapture.
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.
Posted by maccabu 
Posted by maccabu 
Posted by maccabu 
