Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there?

[User Freebsd]

On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Nikolas Britton wrote:

> On 8/1/06, Robert Huff <roberthuff at rcn.com> wrote:
>> User Freebsd writes:
>> >  Actually, using ifconfig wouldn't work ... it would give unique, but as
>> >  soon as you add another IP (ie. alias), the ID would change ... you'd 
>> need
>> >  to do something like:
>> >
>> >  ifconfig | grep ether | sha256 | md5
>> >
>> >  since the 'ether' would never change ...
>>
>>         At least some cards (+ FreeBSD drivers) allow you to set the
>> MAC address ....
>> 
>> 
>> 
>
> You still don't get it! Maybe this simple perl program will illustrate
> the problem:
>
> my $number = "100000000000000000000";
> my $randomkey = "";
> while (0 == 0) {
> $randomkey = `echo $number | md5`;
> print "fetch http://www.hub.org/freebsd_stats.php?HOSTID=$randomkey";
> $number++
> }
>
> Also by using only the mac address output of ifconfig you have limited
> the pool of unique keys to 16^12 (281,474,976,710,656)!!! All I need
> to do to find your mac address is compute all possible mac address
> combinations into MD5 and then just simply match it up with yours.
> Anonymity only works if the input is large then the output!!! Because
> it's computationally impossible to compute all values of a 500+ byte
> string etc. etc. The MD5 string maps back to at least  (how do you
> compute the collisions?) two SHA256 keys and the SHA256 maps back to
> at least two ifconfig strings.

Thing is, we aren't so much looking for anonymity as we are uniqueness, 
but, wouldn't the CPU serial id not be both?
>

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
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