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My laptop wifi adapter (DW1501 Wireless-N WLAN Half-Mini Card) allows me to set a "Locally Administered MAC Address", but only if the locally administered bit is set in the custom mac address (i.e., the mac address has to have the first octet be some X2, X6, XA, or XE). So, it seems I'm unable to set a "universal" mac address (UAA) for this.

My question is -- is this (i.e., inability to set a UAA, only a LAA!) actually a pretty common feature of most wifi adapters? If so, is this usually done as some sort of security measure, to prevent someone from spoofing a legitimate company's wifi adapters (or other/related products)?

ManRow
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  • My guess is that the manufacturers part of the MAC address is hard coded in the device firmware so cannot be changed. – DavidPostill Jun 28 '20 at 07:42
  • Well no I can still easily change my entire mac address (including the manufacturer part too!) to something custom like 0A:12:34:56:78:90, but I cannot change it to something like 08:12:34:56:78:90 (where the "manufacturer" part is specifically not an LAA). That's the issue -- it seems as if any custom manufacturer part of my choosing necessarily has to be an LAA (albeit any LAA of my choosing, but still only an LAA nonetheless -- never a UAA!) – ManRow Jun 28 '20 at 08:01
  • Have you tried this on a non-Windows OS? I kind of suspect it's a Windows driver limitation, not a firmware one, but I don't have that specific model to test with. – u1686_grawity Jun 28 '20 at 08:07
  • @user1686 Looks like it's just a windows thing from https://superuser.com/questions/1265544/ – ManRow Jun 28 '20 at 12:11

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