Intel hopes to develop a technology that will track lost or stolen laptops

Jun 23, 2014 11:42 GMT  ·  By

Sadly, this is a scenario we can all relate to these days: having a piece of electronics stolen from us when we least expect it.

If it hasn’t happened to you specifically, you probably have a friend who has a story to tell along these lines. And when that device happens to be your working laptop, you’re open to having your personal, family and business information fall into the wrong set of hands.

By having access to sensitive info like that, the thief can end up stealing your money or even worse, your identity. There are certainly a lot of solutions that help you protect sensitive data from online attacks, but what happens when the physical device is stolen per se?

Intel might have the solution to this problem. As reported by ItProPortal, Intel has partnered up with Impinj, Technology Solutions UK and Burnside Digital, in order to create an RFID solution which has been dubbed Wireless Credential Exchange (WCE) that will be used to track stolen laptops.

RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) is a system that relies on radio-frequency signal and tiny computer chips in order to track items at a distance. And soon, this technology might be put to good use and be able to track your laptop too.

The RFID system will be able to read and write data to a Monza RFID chip (developed by Impinj) that will come bundled into the Intel System-on-Chip (SoC).

More than that, even if the system is without power, the chip can still be read and written via an external TSL RFID reader.

So, basically when the device is stolen, on any type of info including error logs, unique IDs or device configurations will be written to the Monza chip in order to be read back to the Intel processor.

Burnside Digital is in charge of developing custom applications for Windows, iOS and Android that will facilitate the connection with a TSL reader by virtue of Bluetooth or an AWS cloud-based database.

An atypical feature is the ability to disable a device while in the process of shipping it somewhere. So if you’re moving locations and you send your laptop off with one of the moving vans, the device will prove to be quite a blank slate if it ends up stolen.

More than that, the device could be configured and approved to work only in certain locations.

So basically what Intel is trying to achieve here with the WCE system is to provide a host of new, improved feats that can’t be found in regular RFID inventory tracking applications.

Anyway, it’s going to take a while until we actually see laptops arriving with such a kill switch, because the project is just a concept. For now.