Comment by ranger_danger
1 month ago
Linux has the same kind of identifier at /etc/machine-id... readable by default by basically any application on the system.
1 month ago
Linux has the same kind of identifier at /etc/machine-id... readable by default by basically any application on the system.
This is a systemd identifier, not strictly speaking a "Linux" identifier.
In any case, an executable allowed to run on a host can trivially fingerprint the machine it is running on using a combination of hardware identifiers. Removing or rotating machine-id does not buy you any privacy against a malicious app.
What I find most surprising in this story is how careless these "hackers" were. You would think that people engaged in this type of activities would use throwaway devices running free operating systems and VMs, not personal devices logged into Snapchat and Facebook.
> Removing or rotating machine-id does not buy you any privacy against a malicious app.
It absolutely can if that's the only identifier an app is looking at.
> You would think that people engaged in this type of activities would use throwaway devices running free operating systems and VMs, not personal devices logged into Snapchat and Facebook.
Well, the smart ones do that, which is why they don't make the news as they don't get caught.
You'd still need to have your system compromised by a malicious app to be tracked using that.
On windows, it does that all by itself, Microsoft tracks you with it. Because windows is the malicious app just like the GP said.
Which is also well documented and trivially rotatable by anyone with root on the machine. How do you rotate the MS identifier?
https://github.com/gd03gd031/Windows-GDID-Changer
> well documented and trivially rotatable
Yes, but almost nobody does that or complains about it at all, even though applications may have been silently phoning it home for many years now.
>https://github.com/gd03gd031/Windows-GDID-Changer
sounds like you can rotate it, but it doesn't really matter because the registration/rotation process sends a bunch of static information to microsoft, which means they can re-correlate the the old id back to the new id.
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Which applications do this?
...and that can be changed at-will.
same for the windows GDID