Invoke the gods to protect your laptop

Do you ever worry about having your laptop stolen from your dorm room or from a library desk while you are taking a quick break at the water fountain? Adeona, a new laptop anti-theft software created by the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, might help to ease these worries.

Released in July 2008, Adeona, named after the Roman goddess of safe returns, is a free and open-source laptop tracking system. One unique feature of Adeona is that it gives the power of tracking lost or stolen laptops to the owners, rather than to a company where third parties can manipulate the system and track an owner’s location.

“I wanted to create a system that would protect the privacy of laptop users before the laptop was lost or stolen,” said Tadayoshi Kohno, one of the program’s creators and UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

Once Adeona is installed on a computer, it periodically sends update locations to a publicly accessible storage service. If the device is stolen, location updates can be retrieved from another computer, using credentials known only by the owner.

“The best aspect of Adeona is ... we’ve developed a device tracking system with strong guarantees of privacy,” said Thomas Ristenpart, a UC San Diego Ph.D. student. “Installing and using Adeona doesn’t mean sacrificing one’s privacy.” Ristenpart worked on the project at the UW during the summer of 2007.

Adeona finds a laptop’s location by collecting IP addresses from the laptop, IP addresses from nearby routers and the wireless access points. However, the program has been designed for compatibility with more accurate technology, such as the GPS.

In addition to location updates, Adeona can use a Macintosh computer’s internal camera to take photos and send them to its storage service.

“We hope that Adeona will continue to evolve and improve by releasing it as an open source project,” said Gabriel Maganis, a UW Ph.D. student who assisted with the project.

One future project may be making a version for mobile devices such as the iPhone.

Adeona took approximately a year and a half to complete. Since its release to the public, no success stories “and no failures,” added Kohno, have yet been reported.

While senior Khai Button thinks the software sounds useful, he’s doubtful he’d ever use it. As a commuter, he brings his laptop to school about twice a week.

“I always keep my bag with me and don’t let it out of my reach,” he said. “I guess you could say that I’m a little overprotective, but it has worked for me so far.”

However, he does consider the program a great benefit in laptop recovery.

As added protection for laptops, Kohno also encourages students to use a program like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) to encrypt important data on their computers, and to keep extra copies of important files in case a laptop is ever stolen.

Reach reporter Joy Yagi at news@dailyuw.com.