CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascriptip
Satya
Satya

Reputation: 3128

Get Website Visitor MAC Address of the active lancard?

My requirement is i have a portion of the site that should allow user to access from only one system. He may used different IP's and different by if the system is same he should be able to get the access. My site is in PHP. Doing some R&D i found so JS which helps to get the MAC address if the visitor is using IE. My case is i cannot restrict user to use IE. He may use any browser. Is there any way to get the MAC address. If not possible how should i restrict the same user from accessing content from different computers.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2046

Answers (2)

Keith
Keith

Reputation: 141

Daniel is correct, it's not practical to attempt to use MAC addresses.

For your purpose, you'll probably want to use a few layers. Cookies are a good place to start. As stated though, they can be cleared. The user also may have cookies turned off. Cookies are also stored in plain text on their computer, and they're really easy for the user to modify.

You could also implement sessions with PHP. Each session is unique for each system, and browser. If the user switches browsers or restarts their current browser, the session is re-created.

You could also check their user-agent string. It will be different for each browser, and "most likely" each system, but it can easily be spoofed.

You could also use a public/private key exchange, but that can be a pain to implement and manage.

There really is no one fool proof solution. The best bet is probably to use a combination of techniques to get it as "close to foolproof" as you can. Just try not to make it too inconvenient for the user.

Upvotes: 1

daniel
daniel

Reputation: 1158

No. MAC addresses are not useful beyond the local network, so they're not available in the upper layers (eg. Application layer). Using Javascript to get the the address isn't exactly foolproof either, since it's incredibly easy for someone to manipulate.

If you want to restrict the hosts that a user can access your site on, you'll need to use a method of storage persistence within the browser to store a key - something that uniquely identifies them. Some forums use this method to catch people attempting to bypass their bans.

You should generate some kind of random key (or encrypt a string), store it on the server-side along with the user you want to identify, then give the user the key to be stored in a cookie/localStorage.

Though, there is the obvious problem of a user clearing their cookies...

Hopefully that gives you a bit of head-start.

Upvotes: 2

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