Coreboots Board Status have privacy issues for contributors

I took a look into https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/board-status.git?

The commit here 
https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/board-status.git/commit/?id=72945dee4c60b90...
tells me for example that the MAC address from Paul Menzel is 
bc:5f:f4:c8:d3:98 .
The mac address from the WLAN Router Patrick Georgi is using is based on 
this commit 
https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/board-status.git/commit/?id=addd59d8fb55dc6...
the mac 70:3a:cb:bd:fd:e3 . This is probably some Google device his 
device is connecting to because the mac range is registered to Google 
Inc. Now i can lookup in public wifi databases and in some cases i then 
know where the users lives.
The mac address from Chris Thompson is 6c:f0:49:47:22:4d based on 
https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/board-status.git/commit/?id=da41a5a88bebc9f...

And the mac address from Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli who is using parabola as 
os was using a Hitachi HDP725050GLA360 with firmware GM4OA52A and a 
second WDC WD5000AAKB-00YSA0 with firmware 12.01C02 and have switched 
now to a ST9160314AS with 0002SDM1 firmware. His mac address of one of 
his computers is bc:5f:f4:9c:b7:32 . In this computer he is using a 
KINGSTON SV300S37A240G with firmware 603ABBF0 .

I was thinking of contributing to the Board Status but i dont want to 
release any private data and wont contribute now. What is the usage of 
the world to know what mac address the people are using?

Please fix this to:
1) Remove kernel log and replace it with "uname -r" to just know the 
kernel version.
2) Please make the contribution without the force of having to register 
to git. Make a public account that have just access to the 
board-status.git and set this public account into the code itself. Then 
there can be for example a simple live linux iso that people can boot 
with LAN cable connected. No requirement of installation software, of 
setting things up or anything like that.

[Arthur Heymans]

[e-mail] writes:
> I was thinking of contributing to the Board Status but i dont want to release
> any private data and wont contribute now. What is the usage of the world to know
> what mac address the people are using?

Feel free to edit the kernel log.
> Please fix this to:
> Remove kernel log and replace it with "uname -r" to just know the kernel
>
> version.

The kernel log does contain other useful information, so dropping it
would make the board status repo less useful.

[Nico Huber]

On 25.11.18 18:24, [e-mail] wrote:
> the mac 70:3a:cb:bd:fd:e3 . This is probably some Google device his
> device is connecting to because the mac range is registered to Google
> Inc. Now i can lookup in public wifi databases and in some cases i then
> know where the users lives.

You can also just ask them where they live. Whereby I want to say, not
everybody is in the same paranoid mode.
> I was thinking of contributing to the Board Status but i dont want to
> release any private data and wont contribute now. What is the usage of
> the world to know what mac address the people are using?

There is no usage. It just makes the script simpler that gathers the
information.
> Please fix this to:

No, you, please fix this. You are very welcome to contribute patches.
> Remove kernel log and replace it with "uname -r" to just know the
>
> kernel version.

This makes no sense, nobody asked for the kernel version. We want to see
kernel messages. You can however implement a heuristic to filter per-
sonal information.
> Please make the contribution without the force of having to register
>
> to git. Make a public account that have just access to the
> board-status.git and set this public account into the code itself.

You are free to set something like this up and redirect all pushes to
your Gerrit account. *After* you filtered spam.
> Then
> there can be for example a simple live linux iso that people can boot
> with LAN cable connected. No requirement of installation software, of
> setting things up or anything like that.

Yes, please implement that. Again patches are welcome. We don't lack
ideas, we lack the time to set things up. So once you are done with
that, feel free to ask what else you can do.

Nico

[Mike Banon]

I've already raised this board_status.sh issue a few months earlier,
together with the proposed fix (which I forgot to transform into a
patch, perhaps because no one replied to me) -
https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2018-April/086488.html .
It could be hard to create an automatic filter which will successfully
erase all the information that you believe is private, and also there
could be different estimates of what is private and what is not.
Perhaps the easiest solution is just to insert a pause before
uploading the results, so that a user could use this pause to remove
the log parts that he considers as private. Also, this way only the
user will be responsible for removing his private information and
there wouldn't be any complains like "your script didn't remove X and
some 3-letter-agency hacked me by using this knowledge"
On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 12:03 AM Nico Huber  wrote:
> On 25.11.18 18:24, [e-mail] wrote:
> > the mac 70:3a:cb:bd:fd:e3 . This is probably some Google device his
> > device is connecting to because the mac range is registered to Google
> > Inc. Now i can lookup in public wifi databases and in some cases i then
> > know where the users lives.
>
> You can also just ask them where they live. Whereby I want to say, not
> everybody is in the same paranoid mode.
> > I was thinking of contributing to the Board Status but i dont want to
> > release any private data and wont contribute now. What is the usage of
> > the world to know what mac address the people are using?
>
> There is no usage. It just makes the script simpler that gathers the
> information.
> > Please fix this to:
>
> No, you, please fix this. You are very welcome to contribute patches.
> > Remove kernel log and replace it with "uname -r" to just know the
> >
> > kernel version.
>
> This makes no sense, nobody asked for the kernel version. We want to see
> kernel messages. You can however implement a heuristic to filter per-
> sonal information.
> > Please make the contribution without the force of having to register
> >
> > to git. Make a public account that have just access to the
> > board-status.git and set this public account into the code itself.
>
> You are free to set something like this up and redirect all pushes to
> your Gerrit account. *After* you filtered spam.
> > Then
> > there can be for example a simple live linux iso that people can boot
> > with LAN cable connected. No requirement of installation software, of
> > setting things up or anything like that.
>
> Yes, please implement that. Again patches are welcome. We don't lack
> ideas, we lack the time to set things up. So once you are done with
> that, feel free to ask what else you can do.
>
> Nico

[David Hendricks]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 9:25 AM  wrote:
> I was thinking of contributing to the Board Status but i dont want to
> release any private data and wont contribute now. What is the usage of
> the world to know what mac address the people are using?

Thanks for pointing out these issues.

For what it's worth, the user must use the '-u' option to upload results.
And as Arthur points out you can edit logs and such yourself to scrub any
private data. The script just automates a few steps for convenience, though
obviously we'd like a reasonably uniform data set to compare with. You're
right that we don't need to know anyone's MAC address for coreboot
development; however as others have pointed out a full kernel log is useful
since firmware issues often manifest themselves there (memory map
incorrect, devices not enabled, etc) so it's good to have them for
comparison.

Still, a pause as Mike suggested and perhaps a scary warning or two could
be useful.

Then there can be for example a simple live linux iso that people can boot
> with LAN cable connected. No requirement of installation software, of
> setting things up or anything like that.

There is one - See util/board_status/set_up_live_image.sh .