Physical Address of your PC

StephenVyas

I may be participating in a Beta program for an upcoming plugin.

The developer is requesting the physical address of my PC, I'm guessing in order to create a license.

My concern is ::

Would giving out the physical address of your PC, from ipconfig all, compromise it in any way shape or form?

Can it be used to track you over the internet, or allow people to hack into your computer?

Thanks for any and all answers! :icon60:

monster

That sounds super fishy. With an IP address a hacker can locate your physical address and can remotely target and possibly control your home network. I don't see why they want that info, unless you pay for a static IP, which is uncommon, then your IP changes on a regular basis.

If you actually know, and trust, the developers, I don't see a problem.
If you don't know them then ask them why they want that info.

[edit]
Maybe I'm just super paranoid. They can get your IP by just visiting their website. Make sure you have a firewwall turned on at least.
[/edit]

StephenVyas

I'm the same way. Especially with this brand new PC I bought a couple months ago.

I suppose I can keep this one off the network.
And switch in another Ethernet card down the road, in the unlikely event that things go sideways

JedTheKrampus

tl;dr: There's practically no security risk here, as your MAC address doesn't get sent over the Internet, and even if they did have your MAC address there's practically nothing malicious that could be done with it.

The physical address, or MAC address, is a set of 12 hexadecimal digits that uniquely identify your network card. MAC addresses are assigned by hardware manufacturers and can't be changed. They're used to identify sources and destinations of Ethernet frames and can only identify nodes on the local network.

MAC addresses are commonly used for licensing because they allow you to license a program to a specific computer and don't really compromise your computer's security. The only thing that they could do with a MAC address is know whether a particular computer once licensed their software if they broke into your house and stole it, which is not very likely.

IP addresses, on the other hand, can be used to find and connect with your computer over the Internet. It's a bad idea to give your IP address to someone you don't trust unless you're running a server of some sort and you want people to connect to you, as even if they can't easily get into your computer it's generally easy enough to run a DDoS attack that even a ten-year-old could do it. Voice chat programs like Skype are notorious for making it easy to obtain someone's IP address. The risk of making your IP address public when you're running a server can be somewhat mitigated by hiring professional penetration testers to audit your server's security. I'm not a professional penetration tester and you shouldn't hire me to make a server secure. If you're administering a PC, do the standard security things: use a firewall, never install anything that Adobe or Oracle have touched (especially Flash and Java), use one antivirus program if you're on Windows, and lock your computer when you get up to go to the bathroom so that your coworkers don't change your background to a horrid shade of green.

I personally looked through the documentation of the headers for both TCP packets and HTTP. Neither includes MAC addresses, but both include IP addresses.

Bottom line: give them your computer's physical address. It's 100% fine.

StephenVyas

Ahhh thanks a million Jed!