Analysis on Manipulation of the MAC Address and Consequent Security Threats

In this paper, we analyze manipulation methods of the MAC address and consequent security threats. The Ethernet MAC address is known to be unchanged, and so is highly considered as platform-unique information. For this reason, various services are researched using the MAC address. These kinds of services are organized with MAC address as plat- form identifier or a password, and such a diverse range of security threats are caused when the MAC address is manipulated. Therefore, here we research on manipulation methods for MAC address at different levels on a computing platform and highlight the security threats resulted from modification of the MAC address. In this paper, we introduce manipulation methods on the original MAC address stored in the EEPROM on NIC (Network Interface Card) as hardware- based MAC spoofing attack, which are unknown to be general approaches. This means that the related services should struggle to detect the falsification and the results of this paper have deep significance in most MAC address-based services.