Services/DeviceManager

Overview

Mozilla Device Manager is a project that aims to provide users with a web utility to manage their devices that are currently tied to their Sync account. The device manager should provide the user with a way to remotely wipe sync data from a device as well as track the location of their device.

Requirements

• Service must be high-availability (five nines?)
• Android client must use very little memory when not checking in.
• Both wipe and tracking will require explicit opt-in
• Wipe command must rely on a shared secret to prevent a mass wipe of users

Project

Engineers

• Jason Voll
• Philipp von Weitershausen

First Prototype

To keep it simple the first prototype will only do consist of the following:

• a basic web app that shows a single device with:
  • button to wipe the device
  • button to obtain last known GPS coordinates of the device
  • a text display to indicate success/failure of a wipe and show coordinates
• a basic android client with:
  • a polling mechanism that regularly checks with the server to see if it the device should be wiped
  • a push mechanism that checks in with server to let it know its most recent location
• a data exchange server
  • a python app that handles requests and facilitates communication between devices (REST API?)

This prototype will ignore the following issues:

• security
• authentication
• showing a Google map with location of the device
• opt-in
• selecting from multiple devices
• secret code for wipe
• memory usage on mobile device
• high availability

Second Prototype

Now we have some basic communication working so fix some of the issues ignored in the first prototype!