Aaron Toponce

Recently, Apple released the ability for iPhone 5c and newer hardware to create a spoofed software MAC address for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz wireless access points. The MAC address is locally administered, and a unicast address. This has sparked a small discussion in various forums about how to generate valid locally administered unicast MAC addresses. It is necessary that the MAC address is unicast, as many Cisco switches and routers will block non-unicast addresses. It's not necessary that the address be locally administered, however. This just takes the address out of the globally administered range, and the possibility of conflict with other devices connected to the same switch.

According to the IEEE, in order to create a unicast address, the least significant bit of the most significant byte must be 0. This means the most significant byte must be an even number, eliminating half of the 256 valid possibilities for the first byte. This leaves us with only 128 numbers. In order to be locally administered, the second least significant bit in the most significant byte of the address must be 1. This eliminates another 64 addresses from the total space for this byte. As such, there are only 64 possible values this address can start with. The rest of the bytes can be as random as you wish, giving you a total space of 70,368,744,177,664 addresses to choose from.

In the Unix shell, you can execute the following code, which should be fairly platform agnostic:

$ random_mac() {printf '%02x' $((0x$(od /dev/urandom -N1 -t x1 -An | cut -c 2-) & 0xFE | 0x02)); od /dev/urandom -N5 -t x1 -An | sed 's/ /:/g'}
$ random_mac
3a:cc:9a:1a:fb:00

Here are 16 valid locally administered unicast MAC addresses generated from the shell:

$ for i in {1..16}; do random_mac; done
ca:4a:db:c0:b5:d3
c2:67:92:8b:3c:f2
1e:ca:bb:2d:0c:2b
fa:86:2e:61:90:8c
c6:f4:17:50:5f:c2
12:1b:db:55:c9:36
fe:5f:7f:34:36:49
3a:2e:be:b0:11:17
4a:85:af:03:ca:3c
22:64:7c:49:fd:1f
4a:cb:16:5a:18:1c
d6:10:25:5b:86:42
a2:2d:0f:1c:49:c5
a2:b7:a0:46:72:1c
d2:ac:73:2c:55:5b
5a:56:45:b7:94:61

If you wanted to have a random mac address assigned to your wireless NIC every time you brought up your network interfaces on Debian or Ubuntu, you could write the following shell script, and place it in the "/etc/network/if-pre-up.d/" directory:

Make sure it's executable:

$ sudo chmod a+x /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/random_mac.sh