Only allow logins from certain IP/MAC?

Having seen a couple 'my account was hacked!' threads this month, I wonder if it's time to JIRA up something to help prevent it..

Could there be a way to _optionally_ register an IP address, say a.b.c.d, with an account so that SL would only allow logins from addresses in the a.b.c.* range? Or maybe even register a MAC address and only allow logins from that?

They'd have to allow you to change the setting and change the IP address. Maybe somthing slightly-painful like requiring an email validation before allowing the change. Sorta similar (IIRC) to the password change stuff.

Yeah, IPs & MACs can be hacked but I think something like this would shut down a lot of the script-kiddie types..

Good idea? Stupid idea?

This sounds like a good idea at the face, but I think it would just lead to a lot of confusion and people locking themselves out of their accounts. For many internet service customers, at least in the US, our IP address may APPEAR to be static. It's actually dynamically assigned, but a lot of customers keep their cable or DSL modem on 24/7, so their IP address only changes when there's a power outage or somesuch.

Those people might feel like their IP address "never changes", and be upset/confused/angry when LL blocks them out because their IP address changed and they didn't realize it. This would be far more likely to happen than the vanishingly rare situation that someone actually attempts to hijack the account.

As to the MAC address, there's no reliable way for LL to retrieve someone's MAC address. It's not transmitted across the internet as an inherent part of the communication process like the IP address is. The SL client collects it and sends it over to LL's servers, but now that we have an open source client, it's completely trivial to send whatever MAC address you want.

...on the other hand, using a public/private DSA or RSA key pair would be a good way to more reliably verify your identity while logging on. I won't get into the technical details, but the short of it is that this would allow you to verify your identity every login in a manner that's a bit more secure than the current password system. Better yet, SL already uses an SSL library which could be easily modified to use client-side identity authentication through DSA or RSA keys. It'd be a bit of an "advanced" feature, though.

Well I believe recently I saw some posts where LL was talking about implementing something called OpenID, which from what I read, would offer some kind of extended security, such as requiring a USB Dongle/etc. to log into SL. Not my cup of tea, but i guess if someone wants it, it would be good that they could have that option.

Was going to counter this by saying that that's fine - the server-side would just need to verify that the MAC that the client sends is in the list of 'registered' MACs for that user. That still has holes in it, though: If the evil hackers get your password through something like a virus/keylogger, they can certainly also get your MAC addresses..

I'm wary of anything that requires the user to type something in. Dunno much (ie, know very little) about public/private keys and OpenId but think they're both likely to be open to malware running on the client machine.

If they offered a USB thingie or something like SecureRemote, I'd do that. Small price to pay vs somebody trying to buy L$ with my credit card...