Haller: MAC Address Spoofing in NetworkManager 1.4.0
We recently pointed to Lubomir Rintel's
coverage of NetworkManager 1.4. Thomas Haller follows
up with a more detailed look at the MAC spoofing capabilities of
NetworkManager. "1.2.0 relies on support from wpa_supplicant to configure a random MAC address. The problem is that it requires API which will only be part of the next major release 2.6 of the supplicant. Such a release does not yet exist to this date and thus virtually nobody is using this feature.

With NetworkManager 1.4.0, changing of the MAC address is done by NetworkManager itself, requiring no support from the supplicant. This allows also for more flexibility to generate “stable” addresses and the “generate-mac-address-mask”. Also, the same options are now available not only for Wi-Fi, but also Ethernet devices."