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

[Nikolas Britton]

On 8/1/06, User Freebsd <freebsd at hub.org> wrote:
> 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?
> >

Ok.. lets start from the top, again. Why do we need uniqueness?


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