#How to enable mac filtering mac#
#How to enable mac filtering windows#

#How to enable mac filtering mac#

Once you have the MAC addresses of connected devices, you can mask your self to behave as one of them. The print screen below shows the MAC address of a wireless access point (BSSID), the name of the wireless network (ESSID), channel on which the wireless network operates (CH), what type of encryption is used if any (ENC, CIPHER), the strength of the signal (PWR), and of course MAC addresses of devices currently connected to the network (STATION). Where -c is the channel on which to listen to network traffic, -bssid is the MAC address of the wireless access point (obtained from the same utility but different options), -w is the name of file to which the network communication should be dumped, wifi0 is the name of the network adapter. The following print screen shows what anyone can easily find out about your network using for example the airodump-ng Linux utility:

#How to enable mac filtering windows#

Windows users know for example NetStumbler, Linux users find airodump-ng useful.

There are many tools on the internet which can sniff the network traffic and show you all the information that you need. If you look at the network traffic (use for example tcpdump or ngrep in Linux), you can see that MAC addresses do not get encrypted when traveling over the air between your laptop and your wireless access point. MAC filtering is very easy to break for one major reason. Sounds secure? You can read more about this in our Wireless Wi-Fi network security tutorial 101 (part 1). In other words, MAC filtering is used to restrict network access to authorized devices. Laptops and devices with MAC addresses not included by you or your wireless admin in your wireless access point MAC access table are not allowed to use your network. This is set up in your wireless router administration interface. To introduce some security into the system, you allow only certain MAC addresses to connect to your wireless access point. Infrastructure mode means that you have some wireless access point sitting somewhere in your room or office, and you connect your laptops and other wireless devices to it as you please, and as you move around the building. When you set up your wireless network, you usually operate in so-called infrastructure mode.

What is MAC filtering?įirst, let's make clear what we are talking about. This page describes the concept of MAC filtering and demonstrates how easily broken it can be. Luckily, the population of such wireless users has been rapidly decreasing. Many people still use MAC filtering or MAC addressing as a security measure for their wireless networks, but the sad truth is that MAC filtering is very easy to break it might even be the easiest security measure to break.