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Expect many vans, GCHQ tracking and Forward Intelligence Teams to be all over this wonderful "free" gift :) All the CCTV and databases waiting as you type away, for free, sharing your MAC, ip, passwords, unique browser data and a nice face pic when you look up. They have your online interests, face, track your car via OCR, your friends with you ... all for free and in the open. If you make a VoIP call - your voice print too - enjoy your free anonymous laptop use in London.

and changing/spoofing a MAC address is soo hard.. erm.... not really
http://www.klcconsulting.net/Change_MAC_w2k.htm
http://amac.paqtool.com/
i could go on... but you get the point

Not really. It's just a download away for most geeks, assuming your router doesn't allow for MAC changing already...

I'm assuming you're not using Linux so http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/

FYI that is not particularly secure (read the sections under wireless packet sniffers).

After that you can use SMAC to spoof the MAC sddress of your card.

http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/
http://www.nthelp.com/NT6/change_mac_w2k.htm

SMAC!

http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/

Why not just use the MAC address for identification? No two computers should have the same one.

Here's one reason, here's another. Furthermore, even my consumer Linksys router has MAC spoofing features to make it easier to connect to ISP that register your MAC address.

MAC addresses are insecure. Totally.

Campus Firewalls throttling you down because your bittorrent bandwitdth is more than they'd like?

Wanna change your IP address with your broadband DHCP server?

Check out SMAC a nifty MAC address spoofer... don't even have to reboot...

Version 2.0 will have command line! Muwahahaha

Ya might want to rethink that, cause it's not hard at all to spoof MAC's.

Thank's for the access point.

You can spoof the MAC address on Windows 2k/XP/2003address with the program SMAC:

SMAC does not change the hardware burned-in MAC addresses. It is not necessary. SMAC changes the "software based" MAC addresses on the Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 Server systems, and the new MAC addresses you change will sustain from reboots.

http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/

I've also seen a way to do it for Windows 98. I imagine it's even easier on Linux.

Uh, OK, sorry, I didn't have my thinking head on. The exploit is just to clone the victim's MAC and then let your cableco's DHCP server serve you an IP, probably the same one that they just had, but it really doesn't matter, because as far as they're concerned, you are the other customer. I can confirm that cableco's (Blueyonder in the UK at least) use MACs to identify customers. What threw me was the description of changing IP addresses. This by itself is pointless, but changing MACs would do it.

Yes, Cal State Berkely? Yes, we did receive the info you've provided. We appreciate your co-operation. There is something else, however. According to your logs, the MAC address for the assigned IP address implicates the Dean. We're going to have to take him into custody. Oh, you'll get his lawyer on the line? Great.

Yes, Mr Very Expensive Lawyer, this is the FBI. Oh, your position is that the MAC address was spoofed? Oh, dang. Well, I suppose we can let the Dean go... THIS time.

That's also assuming that the guy uses his university WiFi. He could always find some nice, open Linksys AP's. In my town, I've found close to 150 open Linksys ones that seem to have all the defaults enabled (default SSID, default chan, so default security settings can be assumed - user:admin, pass:admin), so IF logging is turned on (isn't by default), it can be turned off easily. Hell, these things are everywhere. I've even found a hearing aid store with a wide open AP.

Besides, how easy would it be to track someone if all you knew was the university they attend and their MAC address? You would need the co-operation of each and every student on campus. Good freakin' luck!

Nevermind, just found SMAC

: )

WEP is a horrible thing. I use it msyelf, but that's mainly to keep my non-techie neighbors from turning on their laptops one day, have windows xp realize there's a wireless connection in their range, and start using my bandwidth. I have no delusions that my data is secure since anyone could, with a little patience, use airsnort to find out what my key is.

The accesspoints of the future would hopefully have 2 WEPs: One to allow access to acesspoint and a second second one - dynamically assigned to individual clients(probably recognized by unique mac address) for all data communication between that unique client and accesspoint.

As another poster pointed out in this very article, it would be much better to have some sort of PGP encryption in the access point, where you send your public key to it, and it encrypts the data back. Problem with doing anything based on mac addresses themselves, is that you can change your mac address in both windows and linux

Right, I browse the WWW from my router all the time. Sun has a MAC range, but the addresses are easily changeable. Whether Apple has one or uses it I do not know, but plug any random PCI ethernet NIC into it, and suddenly your Mac becomes a PC.

It hands out the MAC to anyone on the Internet, which can be nice for MAC-related attacks if a hacker can compromise a nearby system...

If the hacker can compromise a nearby system, he can just hang around on it until he sees an arp request fly by. Or, with IPv4, simply scan whatever pitiful subnet the two machines are on.

As a non-privacy-related but nasty issue, my IP changes if my Ethernet card breaks and I get a new one. People running a server will love that (and "IP numbers unassociated with MACs" become a premium item to sell to business accounts).

Finally, I can *get* a new IP number if I want one today. If my ISP has a policy (and has routers that depend on) my IP ending in my MAC, I'm stuck with it.

You seem to be holding on to this notion of "my IP". "My IP" only applies to end user devices, like when you bring your laptop to work and it gets an IPv6 address. Whenever you are actually connecting to an ISP and not just borrowing someones network, you get your very own /48. If you prefer to allocate addresses the RFC 2322 way, feel free.

You can't do that on any card that I'm familiar with, though I'm sure there are some that you can finagle into pulling that off on. The Linux approach of "changing the MAC" just kicks the card into promisc mode and then does software filtering when listening for frames with the right MAC. It wastes CPU time.

I have no idea what makes you think that Linux cannot do hardware filtering of MACs for software assigned addresses. A reference for that claim would be nice. Not that hardware filtering makes any sense these days - when did your NIC last receive a packet that was not addressed to you or a broadcast packet?

Anyway, many drivers for Windows allow you to change the MAC address. If yours does not, try this