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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

I feel like I'm missing something here...

Who's going to be fingerprinting DHCP messages on your home network?

Outside of that, fingerprinting or tracking any DHCP info would be the least of my concerns. You have 0 control over any data the moment your devices connect to a public network. What use is DHCP info when you can person-in-the middle all the traffic anyway?

And anyway, what info are you concerned about? Having had a VERY quick browse of RFC2131 the worst thing would be "leaking" the device MAC address which can be discovered via several other means anyway