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fabullo

Member

Registered: 2026-01-29

Posts: 6

/etc/machine-id questions

Hi

Can someone help me?

I am experimenting with privacy hardening my setup.

And I am thinking about full machine-id randomization…

I found guide like:

sudo rm -f /etc/machine-id /var/lib/dbus/machine-id
sudo ln -s /run/machine-id /etc/machine-id
sudo ln -s /run/machine-id /var/lib/dbus/machine-id

Other guide says to go with GRUB (and full update via `sudo update-grub`) via editing `/etc/default/grub` where I need to change some line to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash systemd.machine_id=uninitialized"

What do you think? Better go with WHONIX one from guide below? Or randomize with my solutions? If randomize, which variant better?

Guide https://madaidans-insecurities.github.i … machine-id

Last edited by fabullo (2026-01-29 04:44:29)

jl2

Member

From: 47° 18' N 8° 34' E

Registered: 2022-06-01

Posts: 1,206

Re: /etc/machine-id questions

From what I gathered, /etc/machine-id is set randomly once at system initialization (unless you manually set 'systemd.machine_id=firmware'), so simply using the one from WHONIX has about the same effect, especially since it should never be leaked outside of the system (from what I gather). Note that this value is expected to be unique, so setting it to WHONIX might not be a good idea.

You can manually set it with 'systemd.machine_id='. I guess that's the easiest way.

Simply deleting the file will make systemd attempt to get it from dbus, followed by some other fallbacks, before falling back to a random value. So, you want to set it randomly, I guess you could just write a random value to it.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/sy … ne-id.html

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fabullo

Member

Registered: 2026-01-29

Posts: 6

Re: /etc/machine-id questions

So, you want to set it randomly, I guess you could just write a random value to it.

My idea to kill persistence, not just randomize it once. I want to make it vanish on each reboot, since DHCP uses it (network fingerprinting vector) and other programs like Chrome.