Unique hardware ID in Mac OS X

Question

Mac OS X development is a fairly new animal for me, and I'm in the process of porting over some software. For software licensing and registration I need to be able to generate some kind of hardware ID. It doesn't have to be anything fancy; Ethernet MAC address, hard drive serial, CPU serial, something like that.

I've got it covered on Windows, but I haven't a clue on Mac. Any idea of what I need to do, or where I can go for information on this would be great!

Edit:

For anybody else that is interested in this, this is the code I ended up using with Qt's QProcess class:

QProcess proc;

QStringList args;
args << "-c" << "ioreg -rd1 -c IOPlatformExpertDevice |  awk '/IOPlatformUUID/ { print $3; }'";
proc.start( "/bin/bash", args );
proc.waitForFinished();

QString uID = proc.readAll();

Note: I'm using C++.

Answer 1

Running:

system_profiler | grep 'Serial Number (system)'

in a terminal returns what it likely a unique id. That works on my 10.5 box, I'm not sure what the correct string will be in other versions of OS X.

Answer 2

System Profiler (in Applications - Utilities) contains most of this kind of info. It has your serial number and your mac address (no relation to Mac. All computers have a mac address which is pretty much unique to every network card).

Answer 3

Try this Terminal command:

ioreg -rd1 -c IOPlatformExpertDevice | awk '/IOPlatformUUID/ { split($0, line, "\""); printf("%s\n", line[4]); }'

From here

Answer 4

As some people above have hinted, you can use a Terminal command to get a hardware ID.

I assume you want to do this in code however so I would take a look at the NSTask class in Cocoa. It basically lets you run terminal commands inside your application.

This code is an example of how to use NSTask in Cocoa. It sets up the environment to execute the "killall" command. It passes it the arguement "Finder".

It's the equivilent of running "killall Finder" on the command line, which will kill the Finder obviously.

NSTask *aTask = [[NSTask alloc] init];
NSMutableArray *args = [NSMutableArray array];

[aTask setLaunchPath: @"/usr/bin/killall"];
[args addObject:[@"/Applications/Finder" lastPathComponent]];
[aTask setArguments:args];
[aTask launch];

[aTask release];

Answer 5

This would be easier to answer if you told us what language you were using. The information is obtainable without any shell commands through the SystemConfiguration framework, and also through IOKit if you want to get your hands really dirty.

- (NSString*) getMACAddress: (BOOL)stripColons
{
    NSMutableString   *macAddress   = nil;
    NSArray        *allInterfaces  = (NSArray*)SCNetworkInterfaceCopyAll();
    NSEnumerator   *interfaceWalker = [allInterfaces objectEnumerator];
    SCNetworkInterfaceRef curInterface  = nil;

    while ( curInterface = (SCNetworkInterfaceRef)[interfaceWalker nextObject] )
    {
     if ( [(NSString*)SCNetworkInterfaceGetBSDName(curInterface) isEqualToString: LocalString(@"kEthernetBSDName")] )
     {
      macAddress = [(NSString*)SCNetworkInterfaceGetHardwareAddressString(curInterface) mutableCopy];

      if ( stripColons == YES )
      {
       [macAddress replaceOccurrencesOfString: @":" withString: @"" options: NSLiteralSearch range: NSMakeRange(0, [macAddress length])];
      }

      break;
     }
    }

    return [[macAddress copy] autorelease];
}

Answer 6

For C/C++:

void get_platform_uuid(char * buf, int bufSize) {
    io_registry_entry_t ioRegistryRoot = IORegistryEntryFromPath(kIOMasterPortDefault, "IOService:/");
    CFStringRef uuidCf = (CFStringRef) IORegistryEntryCreateCFProperty(ioRegistryRoot, CFSTR(kIOPlatformUUIDKey), kCFAllocatorDefault, 0);
    IOObjectRelease(ioRegistryRoot);
    CFStringGetCString(uuidCf, buf, bufSize, kCFStringEncodingMacRoman);
    CFRelease(uuidCf);    
}