Counter Measures to Combat Misuses of MAC Address Spoofing Techniques

In a computer network several communicating devices are connected to a common shared communication medium. A network interfacing card or a wireless network card is typically used to connect computers on a network. This gives rise to the need of unique identification mechanism to be followed for each of the connected devices. Media Access Control (MAC) addressing is used to properly identify communicating devices. The term MAC spoofing refers to a situation when somebody changes the MAC address of his computer or the network communicating device to impersonate someone else based upon this MAC address identification. Although MAC spoofing may be essential in some situations yet it has become potential threat for the network security as it sets ground for formulating and launching different types of Attacks like ARP Spoofing, DNS Poisoning, Denial of Services, Session Hijacking, Man in the Middle Attack etc. on a network. The purpose of this paper is to spread the awareness about MAC addressing, MAC spoofing techniques normally used, different types of attacks that can be based upon MAC spoofing and some of the counter measures that can be adopted by common network users.