Don’t Get Tracked While Running
12.01.06 - 03:53pm
A stalker who wants to know when his ex-girlfriend is at home taps into her Nike+ iPod system. He simply hides the gumstix device next to her door, and it registers her presence as she passes by in her Nike shoes. If he adds a small “wifistix” antenna to the device, it can transmit this information to any nearby Wi-Fi access point and alert him to her presence via SMS or by plotting her location on Google Maps. A burgular can use the same setup to case houses.
All this may sound like something out of an Outer Limits episode but it is exactly what can happen with the Nike+iPod sports kit. Nike, has sold over 450,000 of the Nike+iPod sports kit since it’s release in August. Scott Saponas was one of the people to purchase and use the device. A doctoral student in computer science, Mr. Saponas began to wonder about the security risks. Mr Saponos and his colleagues discovered that the sensor in his shoe emits a signal detectable by any compatible receiver within a range of 60 feet. It took them only about 10 min. to figure out how to decode a receiver’s unique tag and a few hours to write a code that interprets the sensor data. They then built a range of low cost devices that can be used to track users whereabouts. All the devices cost less than $300 to make. One such device used a matchbox size computer to track Saponas’s whereabouts and sent it to a central server which than used Google Maps to track the his location.
The sensor does have an off switch although most users wouldn’t even think about turning it off. The suggestion is to definitely turn if off when not running. The researchers say that there are a number of ways Nike could have made the device more secure, although they don’t believe it was done in intent but rather just not thought about. Kohno, Saponas’s computer science professor, said “There’s a bigger issue here. When people buy a toaster, they know it’s probably not going to blow up when they plug it in. But when they buy a consumer device like the Nike+iPod kit, they have no idea whether the device might enable someone to violate their privacy. We need to change that.”
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