Mesh/Tracking

sudomesh does not want to do any tracking or logging, nor do we wish to facilitate any tracking or logging.

MAC address tracking

Since batman-adv operates on layer 2, it should be trivial to track the movement of a device around the network. This means that physical tracking of individuals is very easy if you can link someone's identity to e.g. their smart phone's MAC address.

It is difficult to do anything about this. The only solution I can think of is to have people install an app on their phone that switches their MAC address periodically. Every time the MAC address changes, all connections would be dropped though, but it could happen e.g only every 24 hours. We would have to exempt a pool of MAC addresses from seeing the splash page and have the app switch between addresses in that pool. Guaranteeing unique MAC addresses can then become a problem. It seems like this is a mayor downside to using a layer 2 protocol.

Is it possible to have a functioning batman-adv network where devices can communicate, but it is not possible to figure out which node another device is connected to? I know batman-adv has built-in layer 2 traceroute, but is that feature essential to the functioning of the mesh?

MAC address logging

We have to log at least some sort of hash of MAC addresses at the exit nodes in order to ensure that the same device does not see the splash page constantly. This is problematic since a normal hashing algorithm could probably be brute-forced given the effective in-use pool size of MAC addresses, especially if the type of device is known in advance. The solution seems to be to use a hashing algorithm that has some percentage of false positives, such that several MAC addresses would hash to the same value. The only side-effect would be that some devices would not show the splash page when they should. This is ok. It's unclear if not logging MAC addreses is really that important, since anyone listening to network traffic would be able to see which devices connect.