In this case, the changed MAC address will revert to the original when you reboot. On Linux, you can switch MAC addresses temporarily at run time. There is also a well-known exploit called piggybacking, where a hacker snoops on your MAC address on a public WiFi network, and attempts to impersonate you using your MAC address while you are away. Call me a paranoid, but you know what this means to your privacy. Unlike your layer-3 IP address which can change depending on the networks you are connected to, your MAC address can uniquely identify you wherever you go.

Technical reasons aside, there are also legitimate privacy and security reasons why you wish to hide your real MAC address. Then you could spoof your MAC address to get a new IP address via DHCP, instead of waiting for the current DHCP lease to expire who knows when. Suppose for any reason you need to get a different IP address via DHCP than the current one you have. Many DHCP servers lease IP addresses based on MAC addresses.

While your ISP re-establishes your Internet access with a new router, you could temporarily restore the Internet access by changing the MAC address of your computer to that of the broken router. Suppose your router is just broken in such a scenario.

Some ISPs authenticate a subscriber's Internet connection via the MAC address of their home router. There could be several technical reasons you may want to change a MAC address. In this tutorial, I am going to show how to spoof the MAC address of a network interface on Linux. This practice is often called MAC address spoofing. While a MAC address is a manufacturer-assigned hardware address, it can actually be modified by a user. Higher 24 bits in a MAC address (also known as OUI or 'Organizationally Unique Identifier') uniquely identify the organization which has issued the MAC address, so that there is no conflict among all existing MAC addresses. How to spoof the MAC address of a network interface on LinuxĪ 48-bit MAC address (e.g., 08:4f:b5:05:56:a0) is a globally unique identifier associated with a physical network interface, which is assigned by a manufacturer of the corresponding network interface card.

Wireless mac on linux