What is MAC address

 in Network  tagged MAC address / MAC Spoofing / what is mac by (updated 2888 days ago)

 What is MAC address?

  • Media Access Control or MAC address as it is popularly known is your device’s unique address.
  • Every electronic device that needs to communicate with other devices has a unique MAC address.
  • From your smartphones to tablets and laptops to desktops, each device has a unique MAC address.
  • When any machine is being manufactured  MAC address is burned on the EEPROM.
  • Once the company assigns a MAC address, IT CAN NEVER BE CHANGED.
  • However, there are ways to spoof it. This is called MAC Spoofing, where you put a dummy/fake MAC address of your choice, over the existing one.
  • MAC address consists of 6 pairs of HEX digits that is hexadecimal digits (0-f) and is in the format
    XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX  where X = any value between 0-9 or a-f.

Use of MAC?

For communications in the physical layer, MAC address is needed.
In a private network, if two computers want to communicate with each other, they need to know either the IP address or MAC address of the other machine. If the sender knows the IP and MAC, he will directly forward the data to the other machine since it knows the receiver’s physical location too (because of MAC). In case of Internet,

  • If you have cable net connection to your laptop, Whenever you ask a web page, the server responds to your request to your Internet Service Provider (because in ISP’s name that IP is registered ).
  • The service provider then forwards it to the switch from where request arrived.
  • That switch checks the MAC address of the IP which made the first request, and once it finds it,
  • The switch gets its physical location and sends the response there.

    Switch Working

    Switch working using MAC and IP addresses.

To check this process in detail, see what is the use of MAC address?

To know about MAC spoofing, check out MAC address spoofing.

How to check your MAC?

1. Go to Start –> cmd or (win key+r and type cmd)
in the black window type ‘getmac’ without quotes.

Or

2. Go to Start –> cmd or (win key+r and type cmd)
in the black window type ‘ipconfig /all’ and check the physical address.
The physical address is your MAC address.

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