Thursday, September 17, 2020

android phones obfuscating MAC address for dhcp

Spent a few hours trying to troubleshoot client identification in Meraki reporting. We were puzzled by a number of devices showing up that didnt match our phone deployment list (using MAC addresses).

Well, lo and behold, while looking at the DHCP table, none of our Android phones are actually reporting their physical MAC address, but rather an MAC address that doesnt even match a hardware vendor!

a bit of searching confirmed :

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/Android9MACRandomization

so, question for everyone : I'm pretty used to using MAC addresses during troubleshooting processes. What are we supposed to do now for either identification, adding reservations or tracking down problems? I understand the security thing, but this seems a bit extreme to me!



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