Does .doc metadata contain Mac Address or any unique id?

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

Hii frndz... I need one help..
Does .doc(2003) or .docx(2007) metadata contains any Mac address or any other unique id to identify the computer in which the doc/docx file was prepared?
Plz help...

Posted 31-Jan-12 17:51pm

Dagma D

Add a Solution

Comments

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 1-Feb-12 1:02am

Why would you think so? Well, different crazy things happen, but I can imagine the scandal which could be sparkled if such fact is revealed. Just think about it.
--SA

Member 14475218 20-Aug-19 1:26am

I believe this may have been related to Guids being derived from MAC addresses. It was an aspect of a newsworthy case many years ago. However I cannot provide further information.

And five minutes more googling ..
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5843346/how-easy-is-it-for-a-guid-you-generate-to-identify-you

3 solutions

Solution 2

Strange idea, but looks pretty disturbing. Please see my comment to the question.

Let's see if it is possible to investigate.

The *.docx document format is Open Office XML, it is open and standardized under ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docx[^].

That said, you can obtain the standard and see what can it contain in principle. It contains some meta-data, and, if nothing is encrypted (I hope), you can rename the *.docx to *.zip, unzip the files and perform the search.

The situation with *.doc files is much more difficult (but you don't have to use them, you can save everything as *.docx). There are several different versions of the format; they are all proprietary. Nevertheless, Apache OpenOffice can read them all, so you can download its source code and see how Word documents are parsed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Office[^],
http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/source.html[^].

You will need a Subversion client to download the source code, which is not a problem at all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_%28software%29[^],
http://subversion.apache.org/[^].

The only problem is: OpenOffice may or may not parse or interpret all of the data. Anyway, you can figure this out of the source code.

Care to try your investigation? In you do, please report your results, write an article.

—SA

Posted 31-Jan-12 19:14pm

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

Solution 1

Hai DagmaD,
I don't think so.But we can give some unique id to a Document.Through a Process called Bates Numbering<<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_numbering">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_numbering[^].You might check the link if intrested.
I dont know much about it.
Any ways Happy Programming;-)

Posted 31-Jan-12 19:06pm

Arun Varghese

Comments

Dagma D 1-Feb-12 3:57am

Hi Arun, Thank you for your help.. I checked the link...But there can be documents which do not use this Bates numbering...

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Dagma D · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-27T00:10:00

Hi all,
If NTFS file system is used by the operating system then we can get the mac address from the ObjectId that is present in link files of the corresponding word application. The user have to open the .doc file by double clicking or by using file dialog box. Only then the mac address will be stored in the objectId else it will not be stored.