== A wifi MAC address randomization surprise in a new Android gadget I recently picked up a new Android-based gadget and discovered, to my unpleasant surprise, that it has what I can best describe as "unusually aggressive" wireless MAC address randomization. The most basic form of MAC randomization is to randomize the MAC address that you use before you're connected to a wireless network, which prevents people from re-identifying your device as you move around. To be more thorough you can then use a different MAC per wireless network (SSID), so that people can't easily associate you across different wireless networks. A really aggressive setting is to use a different random MAC every time you connect again to a known network; this keeps the network from tracking you across time. ([[This article https://fedoramagazine.org/randomize-mac-address-nm/]] gives the example of airport wifi as a time where you might want to use a different random MAC on every connection. In general, any public wifi is probably a good usage case for that. See also [[this https://blogs.gnome.org/thaller/2016/08/26/mac-address-spoofing-in-networkmanager-1-4-0/]] and [[the Arch wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NetworkManager#Configuring_MAC_address_randomization]].) This particular Android gadget is even more aggressive than this. Not only does it use a random MAC address, it changes the address on a regular basis and does so *even when connected to a wireless network and holding a DHCP lease*. In fact I have DHCP logs showing it attempting to preemptively renew a non-expired DHCP lease using a different MAC address than it used to get the lease (this doesn't go well, since as far as the DHCP server is concerned the IP address is taken by someone else). The vendor's support documentation links to [[this Android 9 developer page on MAC randomization https://source.android.com/devices/tech/connect/wifi-mac-randomization]], but that seems to only be talking about stable per-SSID MAC address randomization, not this sort of random and actively changing MAC address. This aggressive randomization is also potentially pointless, because as part of its DHCP requests the gadget broadcasts a DHCP host name of 'android-'. If this is unique per device, it's an easy tracking identifier, and even if not it may be more tracking than you'd like. This particular gadget also only talks to wireless networks that you specifically tell it to, and generally those are going to be high-trust ones; aggressive address randomization for your home wireless network seems somewhere between pointless and problematic (if it causes issues like DHCP pool exhaustion as the gadget churns through DHCP leases). (Sadly this really is a DHCP host name, not a DHCP client identifier. The normal ISC DHCP server can assign static IPs to the latter but not the former.) As a sysadmin, I hope that this sort of very aggressive MAC address randomization doesn't become common among Android devices. Our departmental wireless network mostly requires stable MAC addresses, and on top of that we only have so many free DHCP leases (although we could expand the pool, since we're using a /16 for the network as a whole). Android devices that change their MAC all the time would give our people a fair amount of heartburn, and there's not much we can do about it without a major change in our wireless architecture (which is unlikely). (Registering a stable MAC is optional on our wireless network, but if your device doesn't have a registered one, the only thing it's allowed to talk to is our VPN servers. Registered devices can talk to the outside world too.) PS: This particular gadget uses Android as a substrate; it runs custom software on custom hardware, and the fact that it's running on top of Android is barely mentioned in the documentation and mostly only discoverable through things like network scanning or finding out that it supports USB MTP. At first its use of Android surprised me, but then I realized that Android has become a perfectly respectable embedded OS and there's a wide ecology of people who make Android-capable hardware and peripherals that will connect to it. (This elaborates on [[some grumpy Tweets of mine https://twitter.com/thatcks/status/1166530511113789440]].)