Every network interface (wired or wireless) on every networked device in the world is assigned a unique 48-bit identifier—the MAC address—burned into its ROM at manufacturing time. While it’s often (usually?) possible to change this via the software driver, nobody thought of it as a big deal. Until recently, when certain, ahem, spying revelations have woken people to the privacy implications of being able to track a machine, particularly on wi-fi networks, based on its unique MAC address. And so some folks at the Internet Engineering Task Force have been doing experiments to determine whether randomly changing these addresses would cause hiccups for any network protocols. The good news is that the answer so far seems to be “no”. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/26/mac_address_privacy_inches_towards_standardisation/>
That fascinating. +1, nice find Lawrence. Eric -------------------------------------------- Q: Why is this email five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro < ldo(a)geek-central.gen.nz> wrote:
Every network interface (wired or wireless) on every networked device in the world is assigned a unique 48-bit identifier—the MAC address—burned into its ROM at manufacturing time. While it’s often (usually?) possible to change this via the software driver, nobody thought of it as a big deal.
Until recently, when certain, ahem, spying revelations have woken people to the privacy implications of being able to track a machine, particularly on wi-fi networks, based on its unique MAC address.
And so some folks at the Internet Engineering Task Force have been doing experiments to determine whether randomly changing these addresses would cause hiccups for any network protocols. The good news is that the answer so far seems to be “no”.
< http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/26/mac_address_privacy_inches_towards_s...
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While it’s often (usually?) possible to change this via the software driver, nobody thought of it as a big deal.
The TAILS distro's, since V1.0 (which was released in May 2014), includes the functionality referred to as "MAC address spoofing"... "How to spoof the MAC address The first three bytes of a MAC address determine the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) which in practice determines the chipset's manufacturer. The current implementation of [MAC address spoofing] leaves the OUI part unchanged, and only spoofs the last three bytes of any network device's MAC address immediately after it is added by udev." Three bytes is 2^24 bits, so that allows your computer to be randomly assigned one of about 16 million MAC addresses each time you boot up TAILS. More details here cheers, Ian.
participants (3)
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Eric Light -
Ian Stewart -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro