Hey, thief! This laptop is locked
Summary
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"Alert! Alert! Warning! Warning!" This is what you'll hear when you try to steal my notebook. And it will get progressively louder until one of two things happens. Either you put my notebook down and walk away (and the warnings will stop), or the system breaks into an ear piercing screech that doesn't go away, even after Caveo Anti-Theft for notebooks automatically shuts the system down.
The secret sauce is the motion detection system embedded into Caveo's anti-theft PC Card that notebook users can insert into the PC Card slot on their systems. Like an ultra-sensitive pedometer, the card detects when the system it's in is being moved. One caveat: if none of your PC Card slots are available and there's no way to free one up, this card may not be for you. But if you're like one of the thousand or so readers who cited notebook theft as a problem in response to one of my desktop replacement diatribes[http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2871318,00.html], then this product could be a good choice for you or--if you're an IT manager--your users.
Would-be thieves who attempt to take your notebook while the anti-theft system is armed will not keep the system for very long. There are only two ways to stop the system from emitting its ear-piercing screech: enter a 16-digit password, or remove the screeching PC Card and throw it away. To remove the card, the thief would have to know where the sound is coming from and how to eject the card. While neither is very difficult to figure out, chances are the noise will be loud enough that they drop your notebook (probably damaging it anyway) and make a run for it.
Personalize it
The highly configurable Caveo device can be personalized to your liking. For example, you can set the number of steps that the thief must take before an armed system starts to issue warnings. This way, your notebook can be moved a few feet without engaging the Caveo system. Or, you might want to change the WAV file it uses as its warning to something like "Theft detected. About to take hydrochloric acid countermeasures." Or maybe "Danger! Will Robinson."
Caveo can be armed automatically or manually. Automatic arming can be triggered by the screensaver or the shutdown command. The system can be manually armed in one of two ways: select the "ARM" command from Caveo's menu, or move the entire notebook in a three-position sequence. For example, I trained Caveo to arm itself simply by tilting the notebook forward, then backward, and then to the side. As I tilted the notebook to each of its positions, the anti-theft device responded with a sound acknowledging each of the three positions and the eventually arming.
The system can be disarmed with a PIN number, or by repeating the three-position sequence of movements.
In my testing of Caveo, I tried to fool the system but it seemed to be foolproof. Disabling or muting the system's sound didn't help. If you do that, you won't hear the initial WAV file warning, but it's the card's own rechargeable battery and noisemaker that eventually starts screeching. Another thing I tried was removing the card from the notebook after the system had responded to a potential theft. With the card sitting on the table screeching away, I tried rebooting the system, but it would not let me in until I put the card back into the system and entered the password
The anti-theft system's software comes with CaveoCrypt, a tool that allows you to set aside some portion of available disk space as an encrypted volume that Windows recognizes as a removable disk. You can map any available drive letter to that volume. Any file placed into that volume gets encrypted with the Triple DES encryption algorithm. In order for the volume to be accessed, it must be mounted manually or automatically at boot time. In either case, the volume can't be mounted without supplying a password.
In an attempt to fool CaveoCrypt, I set up my encrypted volume to automatically mount itself on bootup, and then deleted the volume. I expected the system to crash. But, when the system booted up and couldn't find the volume, it noted the error and asked if I wanted to prevent further attempts to mount the missing volume. I said yes, and the system continued to work flawlessly.
According to Caveo officials, the company is considering the addition of a biometric device like a fingerprint reader to increase the factors of security from two (what you have--the card; what you know--a password) to three (who you are--a fingerprint). Cooler yet would be if they worked a deal out with other PC Card manufacturers (like the wireless Ethernet guys) to embed the motion detection technology into other PC Cards.
For $99, the Caveo Anti-Theft System is a pretty good deal. It worked flawlessly in my tests and it might be good for more than notebooks. For example, in situations where servers are not locked behind closed doors in a datacenter or wiring closet, why not add a PC Card reader to the computer and secure it with Caveo's Anti-Theft system?
Caveo can be reached at http://www.caveo.com.
Do you have experience with other notebook anti-theft solutions? Share them in our TalkBack forum or e-mail me at david.berlind@cnet.com.
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