Issue #3136: Change: Assign individual, stable MAC addresses for Wi-Fi connections - fesco

fesco

#3136 Change: Assign individual, stable MAC addresses for Wi-Fi connections

Closed: Accepted 5 months ago by tstellar. Opened 5 months ago by amoloney.

Adopt stable-ssid as the default mode for assigning individual, stable MAC addresses to Wi-Fi connections in NetworkManager for Fedora 40, enhancing user privacy without compromising network stability.

Owners, do not implement this work until the FESCo vote has explicitly ended.
The Fedora Program Manager will create a tracking bug in Bugzilla for this Change, which is your indication to proceed.
See the FESCo ticket policy and the Changes policy for more information.

REMINDER: This ticket is for FESCo members to vote on the proposal. Further discussion should happen in the devel list thread linked above.

ngompa commented 5 months ago

zbyszek commented 5 months ago

mhayden commented 5 months ago

Cool idea! I had no idea this was a thing!

sgallagh commented 5 months ago

I'm an explicit 0 here. I recognize that a lot of the "competition" is doing this, but at the same time I've had headache after headache on my own personal home network from mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc.) changing MACs on a regular basis.

I don't know that impeding wide-area tracking is a sufficient win to introduce local-area confusion. But I don't feel strongly-enough about that to vote against this change.

zbyszek commented 5 months ago

I've had headache after headache on my own personal home network from mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc.) changing MACs on a regular basis.

Just to clarify: this is effectively a one-time change, when the default mechanism is flipped. The address will remain stable afterwards. I agree that regular changes would be annoying, but this is not the intent here.

sgallagh commented 5 months ago

I've had headache after headache on my own personal home network from mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc.) changing MACs on a regular basis.

Just to clarify: this is effectively a one-time change, when the default mechanism is flipped. The address will remain stable afterwards. I agree that regular changes would be annoying, but this is not the intent here.

It's supposed to be stable on a per-AP basis. For anyone that has multiple APs in their environment, that means the same device reports itself differently for each. That's the headache I have to deal with.

till commented 5 months ago

It's supposed to be stable on a per-AP basis. For anyone that has multiple APs in their environment, that means the same device reports itself differently for each. That's the headache I have to deal with.

It is stable per SSID. Per-AP would be stable per BSSID, so for one wireless network (one SSID) with multiple APs, the MAC would stay the same.