UserHostAddress hashed?

tristan

We've just upgraded to SmartAssembly 6.1 and we're getting our reports downloaded now except for one problem.

Previous versions used to list the Host IP Address in the UserHostAddress but it seems that this is now a hashed address so we cannot see exactly where the automated reports have come in from. Is there a way to decrypt this address?

Is this intentional or am I missing a setting when we're building our SA project?

Cheers,
Al

dom.smith

Hi Al,

I can confirm that this is intentional. We started hashing the host IP address in SmartAssembly 6, which introduced Feature Usage Reporting.

We hash the host IP address to help protect the privacy of your users: it makes it difficult to link a user's feature usage reports to an error report, which might contain the user's email address, for example.

To achieve this, Automated Error Reporting and Feature Usage Reporting use different salts when creating the hash.

If your users have static IP addresses, which you know, you can calculate the hash of their IP address. This should help you discover where error reports have come from. The SDK in SmartAssembly Professional contains a DLL called SmartAssembly.SDK.dll. One of the Helpers in that DLL is the method HashAddress(str ipAddr, bool featureReporting). So, to determine the hash of the IP address 123.123.123.123 used in Error Reports, call:

HashAddress("123.123.123.123", false);

Naturally, we do not provide a method for reversing the hash, and the algorithm used is deliberately designed to take a long time to reverse.

Dom.