MAC address security - does it slow access speed

MAC filtering if of fairly little value since mac addresses are transmitted i the clear, and an attacker could spoof the mac fairly easily. It will just make your wlan more of a pain in the butt for you to use.

But, no, it's not gonna slow anything down.

Be sure to use a strong, random 20character or better wpa passphrase and keep the firmware updated and life should be relatively neato.

Best Regards,

Ehh ? You just need to enter the MAC No.s of the adapters you use in to the router - ONCE. It will keep 'passers by' off your wifi. Regards, Martin

On Thu, 5 Apr 2007 03:05:59 +0100, "Martin²" wrote in :

Then you forget what you've done, and waste hours of your time down the road trying to figure out why that new laptop won't connect.

Not really. The ones that you need to worry about will be only slightly inconvenienced.

John Navas hath wroth:

Agreed. I got lazy on the neighborhood LAN/WLAN and applied MAC filtering to keep the neighbors virus server off my network. That's because I have a tangled mess of ancient junk 802.11b client radios on the system that won't do WPA. I figured that if I used WEP, it would be cracked as quickly as if I had applied MAC filtering. I figured it would take the brat about a week or two to figure it out. Nope, it took all of about a day before he borrowed my laptops MAC address and used it to connect. I would never even have noticed except that it said that my laptop was on the network at a time when the laptop was

10 miles away and that my ISP called to announce that I was again spewing spam. So, I now get to buy some new 802.11g wireless client adapters that will do WPA. MAC filtering is not much of a security feature.