[Insight-developers] gdcmUtil.cxx polling for a MAC Address

[kent williams]

You need to talk to Mathieu Malaterre ( mathieu.malaterre at gmail.com ) who is
the liason with the CREATIS people who write and maintain GDCM.  At a
minimum, gdcm should have a fallback for machines with networking disabled.

The workaround you're using means you're not generating a unique UID for
your DICOM files, and therefore aren't compliant with the DICOM spec. Not
that it should stop you -- no one else complies completely with the DICOM
spec, why should you?

The only workaround I can suggest unless/until the official gdcm suite is
modified to satisfy your customer's security concerns is this: Modify the
GDCM library source as included with ITK. Then, generate a patch file to
apply this modification to the source code as part of the build process.

It's probably impertinent to point out that using the MAC address as part of
a field of the DICOM header than no one ever examines is not what most
people would consider a security risk. I'm trying to imagine a situation in
which knowing the MAC address of the machine that created a DICOM could be
used for evil, and I'm coming up empty.

On 4/9/08 1:10 PM, "Patrick Reynolds" <patrick.reynolds at kitware.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm developing an application using ITK that doesn't use gdcm directly. Yet,
> when networking is disabled on the system I get several errors regarding
> GetMacAddress() failing because of a media disconnect. I managed to fix the
> problem by commenting out the call to GetMacAddress in
> Insight/Utilities/gdcm/src/gdcmUtil.cxx Line 108 and replacing that string
> declaration with an empty string. I was wondering if this particular call is
> necessary and can it be removed. Perhaps it could be called when the gdcm
> functionality it enables is needed.
> 
> This is of concern because asking for something like a mac address may be
> considered a security risk by our customer...
> 
> 
> Thanks, 
> Patrick Reynolds
> R & D Engineer
> Kitware, Inc.
> 
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