What is the problem?
Your bought a new Smart TV, possibly with netflix support! Great… or at least that was Your first thought. Then You found out, at some point trying to watch Netflix on Your laptop, that “This device isn’t part of your Netflix Household”… Netflix actively combats users that are sharing credentials, even if they are family, that don’t live in the same place. As You can see, they started to use more sophisticated methods.
Tested solutions
First, I tried just to connecting to the internet, using the VPN to my home router. I basically had a Public IP the same as used by Smart TV. This didn’t worked… I suspected, that netflix may detect VPN software working on computer… so i just run VPN client on the external router - that was routing traffic through my home router. This solution didn’t helped for the problem…
As the last resort, my thought was, that to fully model scenario, when I’m truly connected to the home network(and not just using it’s public IP for browsing the web), would need to create L2 bridge with my home network. That was a kind of a VPN that I didn’t really liked to use in first place, however that turned out to be the last resort in this situation. However after a couple of hours, I spun up an OpenVPN server, working in TAP mode, and then connected there with my desktop openvpn client… I logged onto the netflix, and I didn’t got an error message!
Summary
Educated guess is that netflix may perform some kind of network fingerprinting with:
- Default fateway’s MAC address
- WiFi AP network name
- WiFi AP MAC address
- Smart TV’s MAC address
I guess IP based fingerprinting won’t work, since most local networks use 192.168.0.0/24 or 192.168.1.0/24 subnet.
EDIT:
After reading netflix’s “Privacy Statement” it came clear, that certain data about home network devices are used by netflix to determine is device within a household or not. Particularly interesting is the following parts.
That was fun, but anyways fuck netflix, use torrents anyways…
Webrip and chill.
mail is happily wellcome - contact(here you know what)sdr.li
tags: L2 VPN, bridge, tunnel, tap, tun, openvpn, netflix, subnet, fingerprinting, enshittification, smart tv, household, detection