A graduate student at UC San Diego helped develop free software that tracks stolen or lost laptop computers.

Called Adeona, the software tracks personal information such as the computer’s identification, called Internet Protocol Address, which network it’s using, and on newer Macintoshes with built-in cameras, Adeona even takes pictures of those using the laptop.

Adeona then periodically bundles the information, encrypts it and stores it on a server at a remote facility through an online storage system called OpenDHT.

“It’s not going to give you precise physical coordinators, but the information with the help of the Internet Service Provider can identify where the laptop is,” said graduate student Thomas Ristenpart, who developed the software with Gabriel Maginis, a student at the University of Washington.

The software can be downloaded and installed for free at http://adeona.cs.washington.edu.

There are several commercial products that track missing laptops, but Ristenpart says Adeona is unusual because it also protects the user’s privacy.

That was the point of the project — designing a program that gathers information personal enough to track down a user’s location without sharing information without the owner’s consent, he says.

“Our initial interest was lack of privacy aspects of these types of systems. Not only is the system tracking location of the laptop when it’s missing, but also when the legitimate owner handles it,” he said.

“People don’t want third-party users tracking them through their own devices,” he said.

Ristenpart performed the research while visiting the University of Washington last summer.

“People are free to download the source and play with it. One of the ideas of getting it out there is for people to use it.”

The pair is also designing a similar application for hand-held devices.
“If you look at the bigger picture, with the iPhone, everyone is carrying what used to be 20 years ago a supercomputer. It enables lots of cool applications, including those that are geographically based,” he said.

If such a program is engineered poorly, everyone’s privacy is gone, says Ristenpart, who has spent his graduate computer studies researching encryption and privacy issues.