Randomize BSSID on startup

[jmranger]

Inspired by this article (research paper) which highlights the possible privacy implications.

I'm aware that in some form or other, this has been discussed multiple times already (1 2 3) but I wonder if the time has come to make something a bit more official and integrated in the base images, possibly even enabled by default.

Thanks

[brada4]

Please use solution in those discussed threads -> go to access point definition / Advanced tab in lower part / set mac address to random. Rinse, repeat for each access point.

[jmranger]

Interesting. Somehow, I had only noticed the scripts, not the LuCI option. Thanks!

However, given that research, I'm still wondering if making it the default would make sense.

[xpciuhru]

You can make this default on your hardware independent of the OpenWrt image you installed it on. Then at every power cycle the router have a new MAC address. This would be option a) in this thread. When you remove the MAC address from your hardware, then at every boot it does not know what MAC address to set and it choose a random one. This also make sure that its impossible to forget to configure this option and leak your MAC address that is printed on the bottom of the device because you make it impossible to the Linux Kernel that is booting up to know what MAC address is printed on the label:

MAC address randomization by removing the ability to read the hardware mac

Is there some more simple way other then a) removing the hardware mac address from the write-protected space in the SPI chip b) removing the ability from the OpenWrt sourcecode at compilation time to get the same most secure and best working OpenWrt functionality of MAC randomization at router boot time? There are many reports of broken configurations that leads to releasing the real hardware mac address. For example there is a thread in this forum where someone was expecting random MAC in g…