title: Create a Chrome plugin to get Computer Information
body: <p>I am writing a very specific web-app that will be deployed on many desktops within a retail environment and I am trying to figure out a way to implement a terminal-like license structure. Clients will purchase X terminal licenses and since the applications runs through Chrome I am looking for a way to generate a hash of the information local to the machine. </p>
  
  <p>I have had a look at a few options already:</p>
  
  <p>1.) Evercookie. I'm not mad about it, it adds quite a delay when generating and loading and just isnt really elegant. We have this working at the moment.</p>
  
  <p>2.) Device fingerprinting (as per <a href="https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf</a>), but since we will be dealing with many terminals in an AD controlled environment they would all represent as one since they have the same configurations/version and be behind a single NAT device.</p>
  
  <p>My next option is to look at creating a plugin that is required to be installed to run our application and it looks at the local machine and gets me a few key information fields (like Hostname, Mac Address) which should remain more constant than browser version and screen size and allow that to be fetched via JavaScript within the plugin/extension. </p>
  
  <p>So my question is can anyone confirm if this is possible? If so, what is the right way to go about figuring out how to do this? I have had a brief look at FireBreath (<a href="http://www.firebreath.org/display/documentation/FireBreath+Home" rel="nofollow">http://www.firebreath.org/display/documentation/FireBreath+Home</a>), but not sure what the right route is here.</p>
  
  <p>Any advice will be greatly appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Ian</p>