Re: Admission Control to the IETF 78 and IETF 79 Networks

[Martin Rex <[e-mail]>]

Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> 
> The simplest, cleanest solution to this problem is to either have a
> device cert installed during manufacture or to employ my alternative
> scheme designed for low performance devices that does not require them
> to perform public key cryptography on the end point device (patent
> pending, all rights reserved).

Personally, I'm heavily opposed to an approach along these lines.
It is a big plus that MAC addresses can be trivially changed,
and I regularly connect with random MACs in public places.

Several years ago, Intel came out with a unique identifier in their
Pentium CPU.  The market did not take it very well, at least here
in Europe.  I remember BIOS options to enable/disable the unique
CPU ID, and it was disabled on all the machines I have been using
(and AFAIK, it was disabled on all PCs distributed by my companies
IT department).  Talking about it, I do not remember having seen such
a bios option for many year -- may I assume that the unique identifier
was removed from Intel CPUs entirely?


Personally, I'm somewhat less concerned about a unique or fixed ID in
my DSL-router.  I have only one DSL subscription with one single ISP,
and I need to authenticate to my ISP with userid&pass -- which makes
we wonder why should there be a unique/fixed ID in that device,
it is absolutely unnecessary.


-Martin