MAC spoofing

MAC spoofing is a technique for changing a factory-assigned Media Access Control (MAC) address of a network interface on a networked device.

Motivation

The changing of the assigned MAC address may allow the bypassing of access control lists on servers or routers, either hiding a computer on a network or allowing it to impersonate another network device. A user may wish to legitimately spoof the MAC address of a previous hardware device in order to reacquire connectivity after hardware failure.

In 2011, Aaron Swartz was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; part of the indictment against him related to his alleged use of MAC spoofing to download articles from JSTOR using the MIT network.^[1]

Effect

Unlike IP address spoofing, where senders spoofing their address in a request direct the receiver into sending the response elsewhere, in MAC address spoofing the response is usually received by the spoofing party (special 'secure' switch configurations can prevent the reply from arriving, or the spoofed frame being transmitted at all). However, MAC address spoofing is limited to the local broadcast domain.

References

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Changing Your MAC Address

External links

• Arch Linux MAC address spoofer
• Ubuntu Linux MAC address spoofer

See also

• Promiscuous mode

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