[Server-devel] antitheft

Yannick Warnier ywarnier at chamilo.org
Sun Aug 26 15:02:44 EDT 2012


In Peru, after around 2 years of regular contacts with the people in
charge of the deployment of the laptops in the government, the
constitution of an hack-tivism group and a document approved by OLPC
(US), they have allowed on person to have access to the secret key
allowing for the signature of a build.

The person they've allowed access to is Sebastian Silva (icarito on IRC)
and he's working on a localized build right now (which is only available
for XO's 1.5 at this point while a huge majority of laptops in Peru are
XO's 1.0).

In this regard (and this is the antitheft method I was talking about,
not the teachers-students-parents compromise from Lesotho), it has been
a huge brake for the improvements of the local implementation.
That's what I meant.

Tony, I'm not sure who's got the build-signing key in your case, but I
would recommend you try finding out, as this might unlock your
situation.

As we were discussing here, it is very unlikely that anyone with bad
intentions would take the time to try to produce a new build in order to
hack laptops that can only be updated in physical presence, yet this
seems to be why the anti-build-update mechanism was created in the first
place. I hope this can be improved in the future.

Yannick


Le dimanche 26 août 2012 à 20:14 +0200, Tony Anderson a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> The Saint Jabob school in Kigali where I am providing deployment support 
> is not currently allowing the students to take laptops home
> because the antitheft capability is not implemented.
> 
> The laptops were donated by WCE in Stuttgart. The laptops are locked. 
> The software version installed (852) does not allow the screen to be 
> rotated (a real problem for pdf reading). Recently, OLPC Germany has 
> helped provide the school with some additional laptops, also locked, but 
> with a 860 build.
> 
> So essentially, there are two problems. One, being able to install a 
> custom XO and second, to enable the XS-0.7 server to provide 
> activation-leases.
> 
> The os-build documentation (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_Builder) 
> suggests that it is possible for a deployment to 'sign' a custom build.
> If I knew how to do this, it would be possible to install an identical 
> build on all of the schools laptops.
> 
> The description of the 'antitheft howto'
> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Antitheft_HowTo)
> implies that this can be done by a deployment based
> on the serial-number and uuid.
> 
> Somehow I need to get this resolved by Jan. 7 when the new school year
> begins so that the students can take the laptops home.
> 
> Naturally, all of this must be done without internet access.
> 
> Tony
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 08/26/2012 06:00 PM, server-devel-request at lists.laptop.org wrote:
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> > Today's Topics:
> >
> >     1. antitheft (Sameer Verma)
> >     2. Re: antitheft (Yannick Warnier)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2012 12:41:43 -0500
> > From: Sameer Verma<sverma at sfsu.edu>
> > To: XS Devel<server-devel at lists.laptop.org>, 	"Devel's in the
> > 	Details"<devel at lists.laptop.org>
> > Subject: [Server-devel] antitheft
> > Message-ID:
> > 	<CAFoGK8FkBifthYSTk1btg9s9oznAvQ+fP-N=MwitTszXqh7Qkw at mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> >
> > Hello!
> >
> > I'm looking to get a sense of how widely antitheft is being used and
> > to what level of success. There was a post recently where Bruce Baikie
> > came across 500 XO-1s in Ethiopia, that were locked, but the server
> > was dead/gone/missing/ so these were unusable. On the other hand, when
> > XOs are not set up for antitheft, there is attrition (we have some in
> > one of our Jamaica projects, although its fairly low).
> >
> > 1) Does antitheft work as advertised?
> > 2) What are comfortable parameters for it to work? How many hours
> > should the lease be?
> >
> > Not looking for very specific answers...more like a conversation around it.
> >
> > cheers,
> > Sameer
> 
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