This has been an issue I have been looking to for two days. I will share my findings.
I am currently working on an in-house license management system for our software. It's nothing too fancy - as long as it can uniquely identify a user, it's good enough. Our mechanism currently relies on user sign-in + password + MAC address.
99% of the users so far have had no issues, but there is a small subset, the 1%, that has been returning an issue. This 1% is so important to us, because one failure means one hole in our system, something we would like to weed out. Okay - onto the main topic.
Method 1:
public static string returnMAC1()
{
ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher("Select MACAddress, PNPDeviceID FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE MACAddress IS NOT NULL AND PNPDEVICEID IS NOT NULL");
ManagementObjectCollection mObject = searcher.Get();
foreach (ManagementObject obj in mObject)
{
string pnp = obj["PNPDeviceID"].ToString();
if (pnp.Contains("PCI\\"))
{
string mac = obj["MACAddress"].ToString();
mac = mac.Replace(":", string.Empty);
return mac;
}
}
return "Nothing happened...";
}
Method 1 retrieves the MAC address based on the fact that the physical card is connected to the PCI interface.
Method 2:
public static string returnMAC2()
{
string mac = string.Empty;
foreach (System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface nic in System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces())
{
if (nic.OperationalStatus == System.Net.NetworkInformation.OperationalStatus.Up)
{
macAddresses += nic.GetPhysicalAddress().ToString();
break;
}
}
return mac;
}
The second method is a standard method retrieved from MSDN documentation in-regards to MAC addresses.
Based on some tests, it seems the second method is a tad unreliable to retrieve MAC addresses, since it retrieves the wireless card's address. We've had some users returning null addresses as a result of using that method, and while I don't know why that would happen, it could be because there's a lack of a wireless card in their computers. With that said, that's only conjecture. Method #1 relies on using SQL queries to retrieve the PCI MAC. This one has been reliable.
Tests:
Using a Windows 8.1 Enterprise Evaluation edition (free 90-day trial, yay!) installed onto the VirtualBox VM, the tests confirmed that there are major differences in the MAC addresses returned via the guest VM and the host VM.
According to my research, in most cases, the virtual machine is assigned the same MAC address every time it is powered on, so long as the virtual machine is not moved and no changes are made to the certain settings in the configuration file. With that said, and here's the bad news... The guest VM MAC could be anything. So it seems, this is one of the reasons the MAC addresses are inconsistent when used as unique identifiers, which is an issue I found out when some users were on their company VMs. I never knew that's the way people worked, but here we are, so no gloating about it at this point.
My question is - is there any way, without making the user change any settings on their end, to retrieve the host VM's MAC as opposed to the guest VM?
At this point I don't see any reason why someone won't assign the same MAC to every single guest machine to get around our floating license mechanism. Retrieving the host VM MAC would get around this issue, as it would show as one MAC.
We decided this is both impossible and unnecessary. We also decided to use the motherboard UUID as the primary unique identifier, and falling back to the MAC address using the MAC address method below, in case the UUID returns a FFFF-FFFF....... on the rare occasion the vendor does not supply a UUID to that motherboard.
public static string returnMAC1()
{
ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher("Select MACAddress, PNPDeviceID FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE MACAddress IS NOT NULL AND PNPDEVICEID IS NOT NULL");
ManagementObjectCollection mObject = searcher.Get();
foreach (ManagementObject obj in mObject)
{
string pnp = obj["PNPDeviceID"].ToString();
if (pnp.Contains("PCI\\"))
{
string mac = obj["MACAddress"].ToString();
mac = mac.Replace(":", string.Empty);
return mac;
}
}
return "Nothing happened...";
}
Related
In Windows Control Panel, you can find a list of network interfaces/connections which displays the following:
In the .NET framework these are represented in the NetworkInterface class (and found via NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces).
For reference, say I'm reading properties from the Ethernet interface - the NetworkInterface.Name property returns "Ethernet", the NetworkInterface.Description property returns "Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller".
However, nothing in the class seems to be able to get me the name of the network it's connected to (in this case "BELL024"). How would I go about getting that string? I have to know what network the interface is associated with, not just a list of the networks that exist.
It turns out information about each network is stored as a 'network profile' by Windows, storing it's name and other info like whether it's public or not. The name can be changed by users in the control panel, but in my situation that's not a problem.
The Windows API Code Pack from Microsoft contains the APIs necessary to get the collection of network profiles. As it contains a lot of bloat that I don't need, the bare minimum code to wrap the Windows API can be found here.
A collection of the network profiles can then be found like so:
//Get the networks that are currently connected to
var networks = NetworkListManager.GetNetworks(NetworkConnectivityLevels.Connected);
Each object in the collection represents a network profile and contains a collection of NetworkConnection objects. Each NetworkConnection object appears to be info about an interface's connection to the base network.
foreach(Network network in networks)
{
//Name property corresponds to the name I originally asked about
Console.WriteLine("[" + network.Name + "]");
Console.WriteLine("\t[NetworkConnections]");
foreach(NetworkConnection conn in network.Connections)
{
//Print network interface's GUID
Console.WriteLine("\t\t" + conn.AdapterId.ToString());
}
}
The NetworkConnection.AdapterId property is the same network interface GUID that the NetworkInterface.Id property knows.
So, you can determine what network an interface is connected to, by checking if one of the network's connections have the same ID as the interface. Note that they're represented differently, so you'll have to do a bit more work:
Both my Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces are connected to the BELL024 network in the above example.
On Windows 8 and Windows 2012 and higher you can query WMI class MSFT_NetConnectionProfile from root/StandardCimv2 namespace.
It shouldn't be too hard to convert this to C#.
Get-WmiObject -Namespace root/StandardCimv2 -Class MSFT_NetConnectionProfile | Format-Table InterfaceAlias, Name
You can use WMI to query for your network name. You can use this code as a sample:
ManagementScope oMs = new ManagementScope();
ObjectQuery oQuery =
new ObjectQuery("Select * From Win32_NetworkAdapter");
ManagementObjectSearcher oSearcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(oMs, oQuery);
ManagementObjectCollection oReturnCollection = oSearcher.Get();
foreach (ManagementObject oReturn in oReturnCollection)
{
if (oReturn.Properties["NetConnectionID"].Value != null)
{
Console.WriteLine("Name : " + oReturn.Properties["NetConnectionID"].Value);
}
}
I currently have a function that returns the hard drive serial of a virtual machine using calls via WMI, which works great when run on an actual physical hard drive. However, when I run the function on a virtual machine with a virtual disk, the hard drive serial always comes back as the same series of 1's and 0's. I am trying to use this technique to identify a specific machine. Is there a more reliable way to retrieve some sort of identifier which identifies the hardware used in a (virtual) machine that will likely not change?
As a note, I have had the MAC Address given to me as a suggestion, but I do not want my software to break if the NIC it is bound to has to be replaced.
I am also concerned with what might return on a system hard drive which is configured via RAID, as this serial needs to be consistent with every call. I do not have a RAID configured system to test this on, however, so I am unsure of what will even be returned in the first place.
EDIT I have figured out a reliable way to lock our software to a virtual machine even if the serial number might not be unique, so the VM portion is no longer an issue. However, I still am unsure of how this might return on with certain RAID configurations, and as stated above, I do not have the luxury of a RAID configured machine to test on, much less several configurations to test. Any assistance on this is very much appreciated.
Here is the HD serial function:
string Win32_Class = string.Empty;
string Win32_Property = string.Empty;
string systemDrive = null;
try
{
systemDrive = System.Environment.GetFolderPath(System.Environment.SpecialFolder.System).Substring(0, 2);
Win32_Class = "Win32_LogicalDisk";
using (ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(string.Format("SELECT * FROM {1} WHERE DeviceID='{0}'", systemDrive, Win32_Class)))
{
foreach (ManagementObject logicalDisk in searcher.Get())
{
Win32_Class = "Win32_DiskPartition";
foreach (ManagementObject partition in logicalDisk.GetRelated(Win32_Class))
{
Win32_Class = "Win32_DiskDrive";
foreach (ManagementObject diskDrive in partition.GetRelated(Win32_Class))
{
Win32_Class = "Win32_PhysicalMedia";
foreach (ManagementObject diskMedia in diskDrive.GetRelated(Win32_Class))
{
Win32_Property = "SerialNumber";
mySystemDeviceSerial = diskMedia[Win32_Property].ToString().Trim();
}
}
}
}
}
}
If you want to identify the VM instance, you could use the UUID property of the Win32_ComputerSystemProduct instance. In the real world, this maps to an ID on the motherboard. In a VM, this returns a unique value for each VM configuration, regardless of the drives (but I'm not sure what happens if the VM is cloned or moved).
You could use the serial number of the 'logical' disk. This will change if the disk is repartitioned. If one drive of a redundant RAID setup is changed it won't change. This is something stored at the block level so it won't matter what the actual storage setup is.
You want the VolumeSerialNumber property of a Win32_LogicalDisk for the installation volume.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa394173(v=vs.85).aspx
I know there are a number of similar questions in stackoverflow such as the followings:
What's a good way to uniquely identify a computer?
What is a good unique PC identifier?
Unique computer id C#
WIN32_Processor::Is ProcessorId Unique for all computers
How to uniquely identify computer using C#?
... and dozens more and I have studied them all.
The problem is that some of the accepted answers have suggested MAC address as an unique identifier which is entirely incorrect. Some other answers have suggested to use a combination of various components which seems more logical. However, in case of using a combination it should be considered which component is naturally unlikely to be changed frequently. A few days ago we developed a key generator for a software licensing issue where we used the combination of CPUID and MAC to identify a windows pc uniquely and till practical testing we thought our approach was good enough. Ironically when we went testing it we found three computers returning the same id with our key generator!
So, is there really any way to uniquely identify any computer at all? Right now we just need to make our key generator to work on windows pc. Some way (if possible at all) using c# would be great as our system is developed on .net.
Update:
Sorry for creating some confusions and an apparently false alarm. We found out some incorrectness in our method of retrieving HW info. Primarily I thought of deleting this question as now my own confusion has gone and I do believe that a combination of two or more components is good enough to identify a computer. However, then I decided to keep it because I think I should clarify what was causing the problem as the same thing might hurt some other guy in future.
This is what we were doing (excluding other codes):
We were using a getManagementInfo function to retrieve MAC and Processor ID
private String getManagementInfo(String StrKey_String, String strIndex)
{
String strHwInfo = null;
try
{
ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher("select * from " + StrKey_String);
foreach (ManagementObject share in searcher.Get())
{
strHwInfo += share[strIndex];
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
// show some error message
}
return strHwInfo;
}
Then where needed we used that function to retrieve MAC Address
string strMAC = getManagementInfo("Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration", "MacAddress");
and to retrieve ProcessorID
string strProcessorId = getManagementInfo("Win32_Processor", "ProcessorId");
At this point, strMAC would contain more than one MAC address if there are more than one. To take only one we just took the first 17 characters (12 MAC digits and 5 colons in between).
strMAC = strMAC.Length > 17 ? strMAC.Remove(17) : strMAC;
This is where we made the mistake. Because getManagementInfo("Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration", "MacAddress") was returning a number of extra MAC addresses that were really in use. For example, when we searched for MAC addresses in the command prompt by getmac command then it showed one or two MAC addresses for each pc which were all different. But getManagementInfo("Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration", "MacAddress") returned four to five MAC addresses some of which were identical for all computers. As we just took the first MAC address that our function returned instead of checking anything else, the identical MAC addresses were taken in strMAC incidently.
The following code by Sowkot Osman does the trick by returning only the first active/ enabled MAC address:
private static string macId()
{
return identifier("Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration", "MACAddress", "IPEnabled");
}
private static string identifier(string wmiClass, string wmiProperty, string wmiMustBeTrue)
{
string result = "";
System.Management.ManagementClass mc = new System.Management.ManagementClass(wmiClass);
System.Management.ManagementObjectCollection moc = mc.GetInstances();
foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject mo in moc)
{
if (mo[wmiMustBeTrue].ToString() == "True")
{
//Only get the first one
if (result == "")
{
try
{
result = mo[wmiProperty].ToString();
break;
}
catch
{
}
}
}
}
return result;
}
//Return a hardware identifier
private static string identifier(string wmiClass, string wmiProperty)
{
string result = "";
System.Management.ManagementClass mc = new System.Management.ManagementClass(wmiClass);
System.Management.ManagementObjectCollection moc = mc.GetInstances();
foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject mo in moc)
{
//Only get the first one
if (result == "")
{
try
{
result = mo[wmiProperty].ToString();
break;
}
catch
{
}
}
}
return result;
}
However, I was absolutely right about the identical Processor ID issue. All three returned the same Processor ID when we put wmic cpu get ProcessorId command in their command prompts.
Now we have decided to use Motherboard serial number instead of Processor ID to make a combination with MAC address. I think our purpose will be served with this way and if it doesn't in some cases then we should let it go in those few cases.
How about adding motherboard serial number as well e.g.:
using System.management;
//Code for retrieving motherboard's serial number
ManagementObjectSearcher MOS = new ManagementObjectSearcher("Select * From Win32_BaseBoard");
foreach (ManagementObject getserial in MOS.Get())
{
textBox1.Text = getserial["SerialNumber"].ToString();
}
//Code for retrieving Processor's Identity
MOS = new ManagementObjectSearcher("Select * From Win32_processor");
foreach (ManagementObject getPID in MOS.Get())
{
textBox2.Text = getPID["ProcessorID"].ToString();
}
//Code for retrieving Network Adapter Configuration
MOS = new ManagementObjectSearcher("Select * From Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration");
foreach (ManagementObject mac in MOS.Get())
{
textBox3.Text = mac["MACAddress"].ToString();
}
The fact in getting a globally unique ID is, only MAC address is the ID that will not change if you set up your system all over. IF you are generating a key for a specific product, the best way to do it is assigning unique IDs for products and combining the product ID with MAC address. Hope it helps.
I Completely agree with just the above comment.
For Software licensening, you can use:
Computer MAC Address (Take all if multiple NIC Card) + Your software Product Code
Most of the renowned telecom vendor is using this technique.
However, I was absolutely right about the identical Processor ID
issue. All three returned the same Processor ID when we put wmic cpu
get ProcessorId command in their command prompts.
Processor ID will be same if all the systems are running as virtual machines on the same hypervisor.
MAC ID seems fine. Only thing is users must be provided the option to reset the application, in case the MAC changes.
It looks like custom kitchen is the way for that.
SMBIOS UUID (motherboard serial) is not robust, but works fine in 99% cases. However some brands will set the same UUID for multiple computers (same production batch maybe). Getting it requires WMI access for the user (if he's not administrator), you can solve that by starting an external process asking administrator priviledges (check codeproject.com/Articles/15848/WMI-Namespace-Security)
Windows Product ID might be good, but I read it could be identical in some circumstances (https://www.nextofwindows.com/the-best-way-to-uniquely-identify-a-windows-machine)
Could someone clarify if the same Product ID (not product key) might be present on multiple computers ?
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography\MachineGuid seems interesting. It's generated when installing Windows and if changed, it requires to reactivate Windows.
Mac Addresses are interresting but you can only take the first one or your unique ID will change when the interface is disabled, or when another network interface is added and appears first etc.
Hard Drive serial number is nice but when installing a ghost, it might also override the serial number from the original drive... And the HD serial is very easy to change.
The best might be to generate an ID with a combination of those machine identifiers and decide if the machine is the same by comparing those identifiers (ie if at least one Mac address + either SMBIOS UUID or Product ID is ok, accept)
I am trying to get the active network adapter's IP address, so that I avoid virtual and other VPN adapters that are not connected at present.
On my current laptop the following code returns 3 IP V4 addresses, and I don't know how to get the "real", in use IP address from that list.
IPAddress[] ipV4Addresses = Array.FindAll(
Dns.GetHostEntry(String.Empty).AddressList,
a => a.AddressFamily == AddressFamily.InterNetwork);
Looking at MSDN doc here, I thought maybe I was on the right track. Has anyone obtained the list of IP addresses per adapter successfully? If so, please share your wisdom. Thanks!
This is all prototype at this point. I have this code (thanks to SO!), and the string[] netAddresses is always null, even with the computer connected to a network and with a functioning IP address.
string wmiQuery = "SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE NetConnectionId != NULL";
ManagementObjectSearcher moSearch = new ManagementObjectSearcher(wmiQuery);
ManagementObjectCollection moCollection = moSearch.Get();
foreach (ManagementObject mo in moCollection)
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} is {1}", mo["Name"], mo["NetConnectionStatus"]);
string[] netAddresses = (string[])mo["NetworkAddresses"];
if (netAddresses != null)
{
foreach (string netAddress in netAddresses)
{
Console.WriteLine("\tnet addresses:");
Console.WriteLine("\t\t{0}", netAddress);
}
}
}
from MS docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa394216%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
NetworkAddresses
Data type: string array
Access type: Read-only
Array of network addresses for an adapter. This property is inherited from CIM_NetworkAdapter.
This property has not been implemented yet. It returns a NULL value by default.
There's no such thing as a "real" IP address. Each packet you send is routed to its destination based on the metric of the adapter and the available routing paths. You can guess which IP is primarily being used for internet traffic by doing the following:
Order your adapters by metric, lowest first.
Prioritise WAN IPs, then 192.168.x.x, then 10.x.x.x, and totally ignore loopback addresses.
This will give you a guess as to the "preferred" address, though it's hardly definitive.
Look at WIn32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration, by using the InterfaceIndex from Win32_NetworkAdapter you should be able to get the configuration you need with the ipaddresses assigned to that nic.
I'm looking for a way to get unique computer ID.
According to this post I can't use processor ID for this purpose. Can I take motherboard ID? What is the best way to identify the computer?
Like you've said CPU Id wont be unique, however you can use it with another hardware identifier to create your own unique key.
Reference assembly System.Management
So, use this code to get the CPU ID:
string cpuInfo = string.Empty;
ManagementClass mc = new ManagementClass("win32_processor");
ManagementObjectCollection moc = mc.GetInstances();
foreach (ManagementObject mo in moc)
{
cpuInfo = mo.Properties["processorID"].Value.ToString();
break;
}
Then use this code to get the HD ID:
string drive = "C";
ManagementObject dsk = new ManagementObject(
#"win32_logicaldisk.deviceid=""" + drive + #":""");
dsk.Get();
string volumeSerial = dsk["VolumeSerialNumber"].ToString();
Then, you can just combine these two serials to get a uniqueId for that machine:
string uniqueId = cpuInfo + volumeSerial;
Obviously, the more hardware components you get the IDs of, the greater the uniqueness becomes. However, the chances of the same machine having an identical CPU serial and Hard disk serial are already slim to none.
MAC address of the network adapter?
Security identifier (SID) of the windows OS install? (assuming it's windows you're dealing with)
Could you just generate a GUID for each PC?
What exactly are you trying to achieve?
The motherboard ID is a pretty unique identifier. Another option is to use the network cards MAC address, which are pretty much unique.