MAC Address

[vortex]

On Friday 18 October 2002 7:16 am, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> On Friday, October 18, 2002, at 03:26 , ht lee wrote:
[snip]
> So if you modify the MAC addresses of all your machines to some range
> that is privately known to your company, you can avoid these issues.
> Having "corporate standard" MAC ranges also makes it easier to detect
> which network devices are not company issue.
>
> There are many other legitimate reasons why you'd want to change the MAC
> address.

The above reason, security through obscurity, is never legitimate. A script 
kiddie would just try all known exploits regardless. Examine the cost of 
management of such a corporate MAC standard, and you would quickly agree. 
There are far cheaper alternative controls to contain such risks.

> By making MAC address mangling easy, the suppliers are also reminding
> people not to rely on MAC addresses for security (whether they intended
> to do so or not is a different question).

Agreed. But I suspect they offer the facility just for flexibility, including 
cold standby replacements that require identical MAC address, because of 
stange software licence binding or complex network ACL topologies.

shine,

.vortex