News of ISC Developing BIND Patch

Wed Sep 17 23:13:53 UTC 2003

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 bdragon at gweep.net wrote:

> > If the goal were unique identification, MAC addresses would do just fine.
> > No need for DNS.
> 
> MAC addresses are not without authority delegation. The IEEE is the ultimate
> authority in said case.

Yep... But have you seen any controversy about who gets which block of MAC
addresses recently?  They're not scarce, and every block is just as good
as any other block.

> Any solution which requires uniqueness also requires a singular ultimate
> authority.

Not really.  You can just take random numbers. If you have enough bits
(and a good RNG) the probability of collision would be less than
probability of an asteroid wiping the life on Earth in the next year.

There's no reason to use allocated MAC addresses, too; picking them
randomly on power-up is actually better from the privacy point of view...
however, a EEPROM and programming it at manufacture time seems to be about
1 cent less expensive than a built-in hardware RNG :)

--vadim