Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Privacy concerns with DHCP (DHCP fingerprinting) (lemmy.zip)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So many people here will go though great lengths to protect themselves from fingerprinting and snooping. However, one thing tends to get overlooked is DHCP and other layer 3 holes. When your device requests an IP it sends over a significant amount of data. DHCP fingerprinting is very similar to browser fingerprinting but unlike the browser there does not seem to be a lot of resources to defend against it. You would need to make changes to the underlying OS components to spoof it.

What are everyone's thoughts on this? Did we miss the obvious?

https://www.arubanetworks.com/vrd/AOSDHCPFPAppNote/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm#href=Chap2.html&single=true

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[–] user134450 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Most modern operating systems randomize the MAC.

[citation needed]
having the option to randomize the MAC is not the same as actually doing that. There are also a few downsides to random MACs, like captive portals not remembering you on public WiFis.

[–] Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago

The default on android is to give every wifi network its own random but static mac.

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 1 points 4 months ago

Captive portals not remembering you between sessions is a huge bonus for captive portals with time limits.