New doc on MAC randomization

Noah_Salzman
Meraki Alumni (Retired)
Meraki Alumni (Retired)

New doc on MAC randomization

7 Replies 7
NolanHerring
Kind of a big deal

Thanks for sharing.


Might be a good idea to add to the document, how to tell when a device is using a randomized MAC address.

 

"If a MAC address second character is a 2, 6, A, or E, then it is a randomized address."

 

x2-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
x6-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
xA-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
xE-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx

Nolan Herring | nolanwifi.com
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Noah_Salzman
Meraki Alumni (Retired)
Meraki Alumni (Retired)

@NolanHerring Thanks, we added that info to the doc.

That's some quick turn-around lol

 

The only other thing I would mention then is that your example of randomized, the image, is showing 8 for the second character.

Nolan Herring | nolanwifi.com
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@NolanHerring wrote:

Thanks for sharing.


Might be a good idea to add to the document, how to tell when a device is using a randomized MAC address.

 

"If a MAC address second character is a 2, 6, A, or E, then it is a randomized address."

 

x2-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
x6-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
xA-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
xE-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx


And if anyone just thinks "why are these the randomized addresses?"

They are exactly the addresses that are defined in IEEE Ethernet as "Locally Administered Addresses" which have set the second least significant bit of the first octett (the U/L bit):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address#Universal_vs._local

Thanks @Noah_Salzman  for sharing. Man Apple is trying to make my life difficult, first the switch to ARM processors and now randomized MAC addresses. 

Not sure if you were "in the biz" for PowerPC->Intel but they did a fairly decent job at that transition. Of course, not sure how many Apple engineers are still around from that time.

 

With regard to MAC randomization: vendors like Cisco/Meraki will find ways to deal with it over time and it improves privacy for individual iPhone owners. So, in the long run I think it is positive, but yes, we are in a crappy middle-period where products like ours have to catch up to the reality that MAC can't be used anymore.

@Noah_Salzman  Yes I was around for the PPC to Intel transition as well as the MacOS classic to Mac OS X transition. 

 

The issue with ARM is the lack of bootcamp and Virtualisation at this stage a bit of an issue as well. 

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