Adjusting MAC address anonymization for the MQTT Manager

Proposed changes for MQTT

info

Author: Rinor Gimolli

The code, using Python, aims to use data anonymization of client information – more specifically client names and client MAC addresses. The earlier code did this however, at a request, the idea was to scramble the MAC address into a alphanumeric ID – with the option to convert it back.

Initial Code:

Code After Changes

This update hashes the MAC address using MD5, to the encode it in Base64, then it shortens it to 10 characters. This is used to create an alphanumeric ID. Due to these changes, 2 libraries need to be imported as shown below.

import base64
import hashlib

Although with these changes reversing to get the original MAC address still isn’t possible, it is still the most plausible method. For that to happen we would have to convert the hashes into encryption, which in itself is riskier