Generate unique hardware id - Cross platform

[AliReza Beytari]

Hi. Dose Qt have any reference to generate a unique hardware id?!
If not, please submit a code of pure C++!

Thanks.

[raven-worx]

@AliReza-Beytari
No, since there is no generic way to do so.

But you should be able to get the MAC address (which can get easily spoofed by the user though) and/or CPU id (shouldn't be too hard to get on various systems.

[beecksche]

@AliReza-Beytari
Maybe this can help: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5.7/quuid.html

[raven-worx]

@beecksche
this generates a random unique ID. So creating such ID multiple times on the same machine creates different IDs, which is not desired.

[kshegunov]

@AliReza-Beytari

What one usually does is to put a bunch of hardware ids (macs, cpu id, mb id) together, as @raven-worx suggested, and then to run a hash function over them (e.g. sha1). However, generating such identifiers is a pretty suspicious design in my opinion, as any change in the used (for ids) hardware will break the id matching.

[raven-worx]

@kshegunov said:

However, generating such identifiers is a pretty suspicious design in my opinion, as any change in the used (for ids) hardware will break the id matching.

which may be the goal after all ;)

[kshegunov]

@raven-worx said:

which may be the goal after all

Okay, I haven't thought about that ... it might be. :)

[AshkanV]

Hi to all
As of Qt 5.11 there is a static function in QSysInfo class:
QByteArray QSysInfo::machineUniqueId()
https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qsysinfo.html#machineUniqueId