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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 01:37 PM EDT |
The birthday paradox assumes two things that aren't true about MAC addresses.
1) That the 'allocation' of birthdays is random among the population. MAC
addresses are not randomly allocated.
2) That all people share the same pool of birthdays. With MAC addresses
different predefined subsets of the population *cannot* share a MAC address,
because the manufacturer portion will never overlap.
Additionally, there are *many* more people than available birthdays. You're
talking N/366, compared to N/billions.
To guarantee that a randomly selected population of people will contain
individuals with a shared birth month, you need 13 people. For a shared
birthday, you need 367 (don't forget leap year!). If you include the year, it
gets much less likely that two people will share the same date of birth.
If you only ever bought network adapters from a single manufacturer, then you do
increase the odds of running into the duplicate MAC issue, but it's no so easily
observed as the 'birthday paradox' comparison makes it seem, precisely because a
MAC address isn't re-used until the manufacturer has used all other available
MAC addresses first.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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