Wake For Wifi Access Free WiFi Access

Step 1: Preliminary data gathering In order to spoof a network interfaces MAC address, we first need to know which interface we should spoof the MAC address of.

MAC addresses are a unique identifier associated to every network interface, wired or wireless.

Usually, a network interface comes with a fixed MAC address called the burned-in address.

This address cannot be changed, as it is stored in the interfaces hardware itself.

Because of their fixed nature, they make it pretty easy to use for tracking purposes.

This has some some pretty useful applications, such as being used as the matching criterion for a DHCP server to give a static IP address to a given device, or in order to target a dormant interface as required for Wake-on-LAN.

MAC spoofing is the technique to effectively change the MAC address that your network interface appears to have.

It doesnt change the burned-in address, it merely changes what other devices think your interfaces MAC address is.

For example, Starbucks may wish to maintain a list of all MAC addresses accessing their WiFi access points and use this information to figure out someones movements or simply to identify who their best customer is (or at least which one is that guy always hogging all the bandwidth).

Wake For Wifi Access Free WiFi Access

Hey, remember those time-limited free WiFi access points at the airport) Avoiding profiling: The first three bytes of the MAC address identify the manufacturer of the device.

Thus, the burned-in address gives away which company made the chip.

Sometimes thats not important, but perhaps a hardware exploit exists in all network interfaces manufactured by MANUFACTURER, thus changing your MAC address gives you a bit of security by obscurity.

Or, more mundanely, perhaps you dont want a thief to be able to see that you have a shiny, new, and very expensive iThingy at your house simply by standing outside and looking all the MAC addresses broadcasted by all your WiFi devices.

Bypassing futile roadblocks, and unjustly getting prosecuted to death over it.

Wireless access points use MAC spoofing in order to provide multiple wireless networks with a single wireless interface.

Recent routers often have this guest network feature which, when turned on, makes your router show up twice in the list of available access points: The regular network, and the guest network.

This is a good thing, as it gives you some network-level isolation between machines.

This way, even if your guests dont practice healthy security practices on their computing devices, at least they wont spread any nasty stuff through your LAN.

Interestingly, while MAC addresses have thus far been limited in terms of tracking potential due to being confined to ones local network, this is about to change with IPv6.

The consequence of this scheme is that any website you connect to can figure out your MAC address from nothing but your IPv6 address.

More on that later.) As you can see, there are many reasons as to one would want to spoof their MAC address.

So how do we get in on the action To randomize MAC addresses, we will be using an aptly-named program called GNU MAC Changer, available on most distributions under the macchanger package.

Some distributions have a different package for the Debian version of macchanger, which includes some pretty important fixes such as an updated list of manufacturers, more granularity in the time value used for the random number generators seed.

On Arch, that package is known on the AUR as macchanger-debian.

There is also a GTK interface to it called macchanger-gtk, but we will not be using this.

Mac Wake For Wifi Access