Gabriel Maganis and Tadayoshi Kohno: Adeona

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.

We will describe the motivation, design, and evolution of the Adeona laptop tracking service, as well as briefly give a high-level description of some of our other pursuits in academic computer security research. We will also give some hints of what’s in store for future versions of Adeona.