Does the laptop NIC MAC address ever get past your home broadband router?

I'm just curious if the MAC address of the laptop NIC ever gets past my home broadband router.

Assuming my home broadband router is set up with the typical defaults, is there any way that the laptop's wlan0 or eth0 MAC address can get past the router to an assailant?

I realize at a wireless hotspot, where I don't control the router, the MAC address can be logged - but does a typical home broadband router setup prevent an intruder from obtaining the laptop NIC MAC address?

Reply to
Will Dockery
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In IPv4, the answer is ?no?. IP packets don?t contain MAC addresses. Obviously a bit of software on the inside could choose to send your MAC address to somewhere else.

In IPv6, one of the address assignment mechanisms derives the address from the MAC. See

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for details.

What sort of threat are you worried about?

Reply to
Richard Kettlewell

That's what I thought. So only a hotel or Starbucks would know what your MAC address is, but, at home, the ISP doesn't know your MAC address, right?

That is a given. :)

Yikes! That's bad. Very bad. That means that you're unique, even though you may be on various IP addresses!

How can I turn off IPv6?

Privacy. I just don't want my unique MAC address tagging all my communications.

Reply to
Will Dockery

How does this look as a script to change the MAC address at will?

#!/bin/bash if [ $# -eq 0 ] then echo -n "Enter WLAN0 MAC: " read WLAN0 else WLAN0=$1 fi echo "Comparing MAC IDs" OLD_WLAN0=`ifconfig wlan0|grep HWaddr|awk '{print $5}'` if [ "$OLD_WLAN0" != "$WLAN0" ] then sudo ifconfig wlan0 down sudo ifconfig wlan0 hw ether $WLAN0 sudo ifconfig wlan0 up NEW_WLAN0=`ifconfig wlan0|grep HWaddr|awk '{print $5}'` echo " Good: \$NEW_WLAN0=$NEW_WLAN0 is now the same as \$WLAN0=$WLAN0" else echo " Good: \$OLD_WLAN0=$OLD_WLAN0 was already set to \$WLAN0=$WLAN0" fi # if MAC needs to be changed, change it & move on; otherwise move on.

sudo service network-manager restart exit 0

Reply to
Will Dockery

Your IPV6 address can be derived from whatever you want it to be derived from and your MAC address can be whatever you want it to be.

Reply to
John Hasler

Hello,

It does if it provides and owns "your" broadband router.

That's neither good or bad. It has advantages and disadvantages. If you don't like it, you might be interested in setting /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/$INTERFACE/use_tempaddr to a value above 1.

Reply to
Pascal Hambourg

Your browser itself sends out enough info to pretty much individually ID you. (I'd bet you thought the browser only told the web server what brand, so to speak, it was and your computer operating system. Hah!)

Check out:

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yes, that's the GOod Folk at the Electronic Freedom Foundation

Reply to
danny burstein

I get Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 5,442,876 tested so far. Probably because of $ tree -ifa /usr/share/fonts|wc -l

5906

Regards, Dave Hodgins

Reply to
David W. Hodgins

$ tree -ifa /usr/share/fonts|wc -l ksh93: tree: not found

0 $ find /usr/share/fonts -type f | wc -l 883 $

But:

Browser bits of one in x browsers Characteristic identifying information have this value value User Agent 12.12 4443.21 Mozilla/5.0 X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0 ... System Fonts 2.3 4.91 No Flash or Java fonts detected

My point: you can have a lot of fonts but not let the browser share that list. (And /usr/share/fonts isn't all my fonts, since I install some in ~/.fonts/ )

Elijah

------ has fonts in only two of four directories named in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

Reply to
Eli the Bearded

The ISP presumably knows who they have a contract with, though.

Reply to
Richard Kettlewell

Every time I try it using the same Firefox browser several of the numbers change. First I was "only one in 2,721,631 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours", on the next try I was "unique among the

5,443,259 tested so far". Either I've got a good sneaky browser or the website is a scam. I'm betting on the second.
Reply to
J0HNS0N

Firefox:

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 5,443,287 tested so far.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 22.38 bits of identifying information.

Safari on same machine, a minute later:

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 5,443,288 tested so far.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 22.38 bits of identifying information. ----

- lots and lots of info, with numerous differences between the two browsers.

Reply to
danny burstein

I have 11 bits (one in 2600 tested), but I forge my headers and do not allow scripting or flash. Can't make it less than that. The site is legit. Latest versions of Chrome and Firefox can ID you no matter what you do, so I use an old version (of Firefox) []'s

Reply to
Shadow

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