Securing Privacy: Hardware Issues

[Paul Wilders]

{QUOTE-> Securing Privacy, Part One: Hardware Issues
by Scott Granneman
last updated April 11, 2002


When asked about efforts to combat the tracking of Internet users, Scott McNealy of Sun famously replied, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Despite McNealy’s flippant attitude towards privacy, it remains a highly contentious issue, with the potential to affect many aspects of individuals' personal and professional lives. Furthermore, the ability to protect their own proprietary information, and to ensure the protection of their customers' crucial data, may mean the difference between success and failure for many organizations.

While Internet users may not be able or entitled to control information about them that is held by third parties, they can still take steps to ensure the protection of their privacy. It's never too late to begin safeguarding your privacy. This is the first of a series of three articles that will examine privacy concerns regarding hardware, then software, and then finally the Internet in general. This installment will examine hardware-based privacy issues, specifically: hardware solutions for small networks and wireless devices, hardware-based spyware, and some attempts by hardware vendors to infringe upon users' privacy.

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Read the full article here:

http://online.securityfocus.com/infocus/1568

regards.

paul

[FanJ]

PSC, the company from Kevin and Nancy McAleavey, sells a very nice program IEClean (and his brother NSClean for Netscape users).

Link: http://www.nsclean.com/ieclean.html

IEClean is capable to make IE a lot more secure.
It also is capable to defeat GUID tracking.

With respect to the issue of this thread "Securing Privacy: Hardware Issues", I would like to quote a little bit from the IEClean Helpfile:

-begin quote-

About hardware identifiers

*There have been flaps over Intel placing a "hardware identifier" in the Pentium III chip. Remarkably, little has been made of similar hardware identifiers on ethernet cards, modems and hard disks. Hardware-based serial numbers are impossible to defeat. The reason is hardware can be accessed on an "absolute" basis by software and in "absolute" access, can defeat any attempts to "map over" data in software. A hardware solution ALWAYS wins.

*IEClean cannot protect you against the Pentium III problem any better than not having one or using Intel's "turn off the ID" software (which has already been defeated) or an ethernet card's "Mac address" which is also encoded in hardware. As far as the GUID issue goes though, this option in IEClean's SECURITY tab is about as good as it gets since the serial number seed for the GUID process *is* stored in memory.

IEClean is Copyright 1996-2001 by Privacy Software Corporation

-end quote-

[Checkout]

Surely, then, a proxy will defeat h/w IDs? *Going via an external proxy, nobody can see a MAC address owned by a proxy user? *Nah! *Nah! *Nah! *What's the fuss, then?

[FanJ]

Hi Checkout,

I'm not sure about that one........

PS:
I don't want to (and I guess I'm not allowed to) copy the whole IEClean Helpfile, but here is another little part of it concerning GUID:

-begin quote-

Newly added ActiveX controls, digital signatures for your MS Word documents and who knows what else are derived from this hardware identifier and the GUID is used by Office, Win98 and Outlook Express to pin an identity to what you may have hoped would be "anonymous" surfing.

IEClean is Copyright 1996-2001 by Privacy Software Corporation

-end quote-

[Checkout]

All I wish to point out is that a so-called hardware solution is no more than a software solution housed outside the local network, and no stronger or weaker than if it was internal (local). *That makes it an FEP (Front End Processor) which is only valuable if it reduces to load on the local processor(s).

Again: *big deal.