I was doing my daily round of sifting through opensource newsbits when I came across Adeona. According to its creators, it can be described as:

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 builds for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows ready for download and follow the installation steps should anyone wanna try it out.

Though I currently do not own a laptop or a UMPC (planning to), but this sure is a nice must-have for anybody that does have one or several. I gotta see this for myself.

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I’ve recently read CNN’s article on security related to identity theft at Experts: Simple security cuts identity theft risks. It’s just illogical for companies to be storing sensitive information on singular, mobile devices. One thing that mobile devices are very much susceptible to is theft and to store sensitive data onto these devices will be inviting disaster.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Do not store sensitive data to mobile devices.

2. Store sensitive and company-related information on a central location, network-accessible, and independent from servers. In case the servers go down, the storage units will remain intact and operational. Network-attached storage and Storage-area networks are perfect for this.

3. Allow access to data only to a select few. Clear-cut definition of access policies will do the trick. Map out which users and groups will have access to the data.

4. External access must be facilitated via a secure connection probably via VPN or SSH tunnels.

5. Data accessed externally must not be allowed to be stored off-site. Access must be provided via web interface or remote front-end but the data will be stored in the same repository negating storing on the accessing machine.

6. All users must have single sign-on to the general sections of the network, both internal and external access. A second login must be provided for extremely sensitive data.

My suggestions are just common sense. These can be implemented using opensource negating exhorbitant cost to the enterprise. Companies like Novell can provide the same features at low cost to the enterprise along with top-notch technical support.

One thing I’ve observed in organizations is that some administrators seldom implement strict security guidelines throughout the enterprise. In the end it is always the user that bears the blame. Properly implemented security measures will definitely save the enterprise the trouble and headache in dealing with this type of security problem.

If I’d missed something, I’d love to hear about it.

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