p2pnet - rss feed: OLPC XO anti-theft system
p2pnet.net news:- A while back the word was going around that the One Laptop Per Child XO laptops, due to start shipping in July, would be for sale to anyone who wanted one, with the qualification that they’d also have to buy another for free distribution to a needy child somewhere.
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization aiming to provide children in developing nations with XOs which will ultimately cost $100. At the moment, they come in at about $130.
But, “contrary to previously published reports OLPC has no plans to make the XO laptops available for sale to the general public,” said the organization. “OLPC’s focus is getting XO laptops into the hands of children in developing nations.”
Now OLPC has gone a step further to make sure the laptops don’t end up in the hands of thieves or profiteers for re-sale at boosted prices, or for parts.
XOs will phone home once a day.
This is how OLPC sets it out:
The OLPC project has received very strong requests from certain countries considering joining the program to provide a powerful anti-theft service that would act as a theft deterrent against most thieves.
We provide such a service for interested countries to enable on the laptops. It works by running, as a privileged process that cannot be disabled or terminated even by the root user, an anti-theft daemon which detects Internet access, and performs a call-home request — no more than once a day — to the country’s anti-theft servers. In so doing, it is able to securely use NTP to set the machine RTC to the current time, and then obtain a cryptographic lease to keep running for some amount of time, e.g. 21 days. The lease duration is controlled by each country.
A stolen laptop will have its (SN, UUID) tuple reported to the country’s OLPC oversight body in charge of the anti-theft service. The laptop will be marked stolen in the country’s master database.
A thief might do several things with a laptop: use it to connect to the Internet, remove it from any networks and attempt to use it as a standalone machine, or take it apart for parts.
In the former case, the anti-theft daemon would learn that the laptop is stolen as soon as it’s connected to the Internet, and would perform a hard shutdown and lock the machine such that it requires activation, described previously, to function.
We do not expect the machines will be an appealing target for part resale. Save for the custom display, all valuable parts of the XO laptops are soldered onto the motherboard.
To address the case where a stolen machine is used as a personal computer but not connected to the Internet, the anti-theft daemon will shut down and lock the machine if its cryptographic lease ever expires. In other words, if the country operates with 21-day leases, a normal, non-stolen laptop will get the lease extended by 21 days each day it connects to the Internet. But if the machine does not connect to the Internet for 21 days, it will shut down and lock.
Since this might present a problem in some countries due to intermittent Internet access, the leases can either be made to last rather long (they’re still an effective theft deterrent even with a 3 month duration), or they can be manually extended by connecting a USB drive to the activation server. For instance, a country may issue 3-week leases, but if a school has a satellite dish failure, the country’s OLPC oversight body may mail a USB drive to the school handler, which when connected to the school server, transparently extends the lease of each referenced laptop for some period of time.
The anti-theft system cannot be bypassed as long as P_SF_CORE is enabled (and disabling it requires a developer key). This, in effect, means that a child is free to do any modification to her machine’s userspace (by disabling P_SF_RUN without a developer key), but cannot change the running kernel without requesting the key. The key-issuing process incorporates a 14-day delay to allow for a slow theft report to percolate up through the system, and is only issued if the machine is not reported stolen at the end of that period of time.
(Thanks, Mai)
Also See:
sale to anyone - OLPC laptops on general sale, January 10, 2007
Los Angeles Times - Hollywood Weighs Copyright Protections, February 9, 2007
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July 28th, 2007 at 9:25 am
[…] it is supposed to look unattractive to adults but attractive to children. There’s also an optional DRM-like anti-theft mechanism. This requests (through the internet) permission to continue working every day. If the laptop has […]