Your MAC Address Randomization attempts are futile!

Originally published at: News - Whonix Forum
The following paper explains why.

Why MAC Address Randomization is not Enough:
An Analysis of Wi-Fi Network Discovery Mechanisms

The above interesting paper has been found by HulaHoop and added to Whonix MAC address documentation.

Hi Patrick,

Yes - and your chats in the link below were interesting.

Good to see some progress has been made on this issue via Bugzilla (June). There are so many weaknesses with wi-fi (see DefCon in any given year for example), that it is probably best not to use it at all.

Out of interest, I know Whonix hides the MAC addresses from the net VM in Qubes, but for fun I tried the Qubes spoofing instructions anyway.

The instructions below do not work for me (ethernet) when running Qubes-Whonix. It will always fail at 80% bootstrapping, despite presence of the service in the net VM, successful change of the MAC address when checked under ifconfig etc.

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/anonymizing-your-mac-address/

I wonder if anybody else has had luck, or is it not meant to work at all while running Whonix concurrently. I know this is total overkill, but it is always fun to play around with :slight_smile: