Re: Theft Recovery: Useful Tool or SpyWare?
Re: Theft Recovery: Useful Tool or SpyWare?
- Subject: Re: Theft Recovery: Useful Tool or SpyWare?
- From: Mike Evans <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 19:49:37 -0500
I've no idea to the marketability of the idea, but here's my experience.
At work, we started an 80 unit, 1-to-1 laptop initiative with middle schoolers this year. The laptops are iBooks and the kids take the machines home at night and on the weekends. I was asked to develop a "Tracking Service" just in case one of them walked away. The tracker was explicitly listed in the Student Laptop Agreement form.
I don't have the code here at home, but it wasn't that hard to make. (although I did take a different approach than email).
So I started with a foundation tool turned unix daemon. At startup and every 4 hours thereafter the service phones home to a MySQL backed PHP page. Providing the short user name, all MAC address(es), and IP. Once a month, the database is flushed and so far, no one has looked at it.
A couple of quick tips. If I remember correctly, to keep the app alive you'll have to add an NSConnection to an empty NSPort in the current run loop. If you've got access to an active web site like PHP/MySQL, it's fairly easy to use an NSURLRequest and GET variables to "ping" the PHP. From there, have it parse the URL and add the appropriate info to the database.
To get the MAC addresses, either parse the output of 'ifconfig' or check out the Carbon function '
OTInetGetInterfaceInfo'
Hope this helps.
On Sep 23, 2004, at 5:17 PM, Nate Murray wrote:
i know that this is not directly related any specifics of cocoa programming but i have an idea that i would like to bounce off of a couple of peers.
im thinking of making a nearly invisible background application that "phones home" to protect against theft. what it would do is send an email to a specified email address. it would send the ip address of the computer every time it starts up if it is connected to the internet.
this idea isnt new, you can find a script at macosxhints.com to do it. but my version will have a few modifications that i havnt seen before.
the scripts that ive seen you have to setup "sendmail" on the computer. i would make that an option, but i would also make it an option for it to connect to a certain smtp server online you could specify with the partner installation/options app. (because obviously you wouldnt want a pref. pane or something because you dont want the thief to know its there.)
it would also have a slick package. nice graphics, easy installation, very user friendly. and a lot easier to use than a shell script which is really unapproachable for most people.
but lets say you dont want to send yourself an email every time you restart your computer, because you dont want to fill your own mailbox with your own junkmail. so what you could do is have it send the email only every week or every month (depending on your comfortable risk) this is great because you dont have as many emails, but then it becomes inconvienent if your computer actually does get stolen.
SO what you could do is program it to check a certain email address (say you set up a free yahoo mail account) when it sends you the daily/weekly email. what it could do is search through the subject headings of those emails and take the emails that are directed to the phonehome program as commands.
ie: email heading: #phonehome -everyhour -verbose password
when the phonehome program found that email it would send an email every hour with as much information about the computer it has access too. (maybe new user name, uptime, i dont know what else yet). the password is obviously to reduce exploitation.
the last part of the email interaction by recieving commands is an idea i've never seen before, but if someone else has thought of it and/or tried it let me know.
all the installation, option setting, and uninstallation would be controlled by the companion app i was talking about. otherwise it would try to be a silent and invisible as possible.
My question is this:
is this useful, marketable software or a blueprint for vicious spyware?
-Nate _______________________________________________
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