A media access control address is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces
for communications on the physical network segment.
MAC addresses are used as a network address for most IEEE 802 network technologies, including
Ethernet.
Logically, MAC addresses are used in the media access control protocol sublayer of the OSI
reference model.
MAC addresses are most often assigned by the manufacturer of a network interface controller
and are stored in its hardware, such as the card's read-only memory or some other firmware
mechanism.
If assigned by the manufacturer, a MAC address usually encodes the manufacturer's registered
identification number and may be referred to as the burned-in address.
It may also be known as an Ethernet hardware address, hardware address or physical address.
This can be contrasted to a programmed address, where the host device issues commands to the
NIC to use an arbitrary address.
A network node may have multiple NICs and each NIC must have a unique MAC address.
MAC addresses are formed according to the rules of one of three numbering name spaces
managed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers: MAC-48, EUI-48, and
EUI-64.
The IEEE claims trademarks on the names EUI-48 and EUI-64, in which EUI is an abbreviation
for Extended Unique Identifier.
Notational conventions The standard format for printing MAC-48 addresses
in human-friendly form is six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens or
colons, in transmission order.
This form is also commonly used for EUI-64.
Another convention used by networking equipment uses three groups of four hexadecimal digits
separated by dots, again in transmission order.
Address details
The original IEEE 802 MAC address comes from the original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme.
This 48-bit address space contains potentially 248 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses.
All three numbering systems use the same format and differ only in the length of the identifier.
Addresses can either be universally administered addresses or locally administered addresses.
A universally administered address is uniquely assigned to a device by its manufacturer.
The first three octets identify the organization that issued the identifier and are known as
the Organizationally Unique Identifier.
The following three or five octets are assigned by that organization in nearly any manner
they please, subject to the constraint of uniqueness.
The IEEE has a target lifetime of 100 years for applications using MAC-48 space, but encourages
adoption of EUI-64s instead.
A locally administered address is assigned to a device by a network administrator, overriding
the burned-in address.
Locally administered addresses do not contain OUIs.
Universally administered and locally administered addresses are distinguished by setting the
second-least-significant bit of the most significant byte of the address.
This bit is also referred to as the U/L bit, short for Universal/Local, which identifies
how the address is administered.
If the bit is 0, the address is universally administered.
If it is 1, the address is locally administered.
In the example address 06-00-00-00-00-00 the most significant byte is 06, the binary form
of which is 00000110, where the second-least-significant bit is 1.
Therefore, it is a locally administered address.
Consequently, this bit is 0 in all OUIs.
If the least significant bit of the most significant octet of an address is set to 0, the frame
is meant to reach only one receiving NIC.
This type of transmission is called unicast.
A unicast frame is transmitted to all nodes within the collision domain, which typically
ends at the nearest network switch or router.
A switch will forward a unicast frame through all of its ports if the switch has no knowledge
of which port leads to that MAC address, or just to the proper port if it does have knowledge.
Only the node with the matching hardware MAC address will accept the frame; network frames
with non-matching MAC-addresses are ignored, unless the device is in promiscuous mode.
If the least significant bit of the most significant address octet is set to 1, the frame will
still be sent only once; however, NICs will choose to accept it based on criteria other
than the matching of a MAC address: for example, based on a configurable list of accepted multicast
MAC addresses.
This is called multicast addressing.
The following technologies use the MAC-48 identifier format:
Ethernet 802.11 wireless networks
Bluetooth IEEE 802.5 token ring
most other IEEE 802 networks Fiber Distributed Data Interface
Asynchronous Transfer Mode, switched virtual connections only, as part of an NSAP address
Fibre Channel and Serial Attached SCSI The ITU-T G.hn standard, which provides a
way to create a high-speed local area network using existing home wiring.
The G.hn Application Protocol Convergence layer accepts Ethernet frames that use the
MAC-48 format and encapsulates them into G.hn Medium Access Control Service Data Units.
Every device that connects to an IEEE 802 network has a MAC-48 address.
Common consumer devices to use MAC-48 include every PC, smartphone or tablet computer.
The distinction between EUI-48 and MAC-48 identifiers is purely nominal: MAC-48 is used
for network hardware; EUI-48 is used to identify other devices and software.
The IEEE now considers the label MAC-48 to be an obsolete term, previously used to refer
to a specific type of EUI-48 identifier used to address hardware interfaces within existing
802-based networking applications, and thus not to be used in the future.
Instead, the proprietary term EUI-48 should be used for this purpose.
The EUI-48 is expected to have its address space exhausted by the year 2100.
EUI-64 identifiers are used in: FireWire
IPv6 ZigBee / 802.15.4 / 6LoWPAN wireless personal-area
networks The IEEE has built in several special address
types to allow more than one network interface card to be addressed at one time:
Packets sent to the broadcast address, all one bits, are received by all stations on
a local area network.
In hexadecimal the broadcast address would be FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF.
A broadcast frame is flooded and is forwarded to and accepted by all other nodes.
Packets sent to a multicast address are received by all stations on a LAN that have been configured
to receive packets sent to that address.
Functional addresses identify one or more Token Ring NICs that provide a particular
service, defined in IEEE 802.5.
These are all examples of group addresses, as opposed to individual addresses; the least
significant bit of the first octet of a MAC address distinguishes individual addresses
from group addresses.
That bit is set to 0 in individual addresses and set to 1 in group addresses.
Group addresses, like individual addresses, can be universally administered or locally
administered.
In addition, the EUI-64 numbering system encompasses both MAC-48 and EUI-48 identifiers by a simple
translation mechanism.
To convert a MAC-48 into an EUI-64, copy the OUI, append the two octets FF-FF and then
copy the organization-specified extension identifier.
To convert an EUI-48 into an EUI-64, the same process is used, but the sequence inserted
is FF-FE.
In both cases, the process can be trivially reversed when necessary.
Organizations issuing EUI-64s are cautioned against issuing identifiers that could be
confused with these forms.
The IEEE policy is to discourage new uses of 48-bit identifiers in favor of the EUI-64
system.IPv6 — one of the most prominent standards that uses a Modified EUI-64 — treats
MAC-48 as EUI-48 instead and toggles the U/L bit.
This results in extending MAC addresses to Modified EUI-64 using only FF-FE and with
the U/L bit inverted.
Individual address block An Individual Address Block is a 24-bit OUI
managed by the IEEE Registration Authority, followed by 12 IEEE-provided bits, and 12
bits for the owner to assign to individual devices.
An IAB is ideal for organizations requiring fewer than 4097 unique 48-bit numbers.
Usage in hosts Although intended to be a permanent and globally
unique identification, it is possible to change the MAC address on most modern hardware.
Changing MAC addresses is necessary in network virtualization.
It can also be used in the process of exploiting security vulnerabilities.
This is called MAC spoofing.
A host cannot determine from the MAC address of another host whether that host is on the
same link as the sending host, or on a network segment bridged to that network segment.
In IP networks, the MAC address of an interface can be queried given the IP address using
the Address Resolution Protocol for Internet Protocol Version 4 or the Neighbor Discovery
Protocol for IPv6.
In this way, ARP or NDP is used to translate IP addresses into Ethernet MAC addresses.
On broadcast networks, such as Ethernet, the MAC address uniquely identifies each node
on that segment and allows frames to be marked for specific hosts.
It thus forms the basis of most of the link layer networking upon which upper layer protocols
rely to produce complex, functioning networks.
Usage in switches Layer 2 switches use MAC addresses to restrict
packet transmission to the intended recipient.
However, the effect is not immediate.
Bit-reversed notation The standard notation, also called canonical
format, for MAC addresses is written in transmission bit order with the least significant bit transmitted
first, as seen in the output of the iproute2ipconfig command, for example.
However, since IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.4 send the bytes over the wire, left-to-right, with
least significant bit in each byte first, while IEEE 802.5 and IEEE 802.6 send the bytes
over the wire with the most significant bit first, confusion may arise when an address
in the latter scenario is represented with bits reversed from the canonical representation.
For example, an address in canonical form 12-34-56-78-9A-BC would be transmitted over
the wire as bits 01001000 00101100 01101010 00011110 01011001 00111101 in the standard
transmission order.
But for Token Ring networks, it would be transmitted as bits 00010010 00110100 01010110 01111000
10011010 10111100 in most-significant-bit first order.
The latter might be incorrectly displayed as 48-2C-6A-1E-59-3D.
This is referred to as bit-reversed order, non-canonical form, MSB format, IBM format,
or Token Ring format, as explained in RFC 2469.
Canonical form is generally preferred, and used by all modern implementations.
When the first switches supporting both Token Ring and Ethernet came out, some did not distinguish
between canonical form and non-canonical form and so did not reverse MAC address bits as
required.
This led to cases of duplicate MAC addresses in the field.
See also Organizationally Unique Identifier
Internet Protocol version 6 Hot Standby Router Protocol or standard alternative
VRRP Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol, which allows multiple routers to share one IP address
and MAC address to provide router redundancy.
The OpenBSD project has an open source alternative, the Common Address Redundancy Protocol.
On Linux, iptables has a CLUSTERIP target.
NSAP address, another endpoint addressing scheme.
Sleep Proxy Service, which may 'take over' another device's MAC address during certain
periods References
External links IEEE Registration Authority Tutorials
IEEE Public OUI and Company_id Assignment lookup
IEEE Public IAB list IEEE Searchable/List Lookup OUI Database
IEEE Public OUI list IANA Considerations and IETF Protocol Usage
for IEEE 802 Parameters IANA list of Ethernet Numbers
Wireshark's OUI Lookup Tool and MAC address list
MAC Address Lookup Tool