Travel Hack: How to Change Your MAC Address for more Free Wi-Fi

Often when you want to access public wifi, you will have some sort of limit set on your usage. Often you will have some sort of restriction, such as free 15 minutes. This is usually bound by a MAC address. In this article, I want to show you how to change your MAC address to avoid these limits. Other times, you will have to authenticate, and then still have to pay per device — We’ll get into how to avoid this here.

Note that, this might have unwanted consequences, e.g. if you are using a laptop that is authenticated at work. So proceed at your own risk! And always keep backups!

What is a MAC Address?

MAC is short for Media Access Control. And it basically is a unique identifier for each network-capable device. It consists of 12 alphanumeric characters, looking something like AB:12:CD:3E:FG:12. Since every device has its own MAC address, it’s handy to authenticate users that way, but since we are looking to avoid the tracking, we’re going to change ours.

We’ll go over the steps for different operating systems now, starting with UNIX-based Systems.

UNIX-based (Linux/macOS)

To change your MAC address, the first thing you should do is check out your actual MAC address. For this, you have to open a terminal, and then run:

ifconfig en0 | grep ether

The output should look something like this:

ether ab:2d:ef:12:bb:f2

Write this down!

Next, you can generate a random address with:

openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\\(..\\)/\\1:/g; s/.$//'

Alternatively, you can just generate a MAC address online somewhere like: here

Next, you should set your MAC address to the newly generated value like so:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether 3a:bc:e3:2f:ab:cb

Congratulations, you now have a new MAC address. When you’re done, you can just change it back with the same command, just use your previous MAC address instead of the randomly generated one.

iOS

iOS does not allow for a granular change of MAC addresses. It is, however, possible to get one other address, by going to your Wifi settings, selecting the Wifi you want to connect to, and clicking the (i) button. You can then check the “Private Wi-Fi Address” box, and you will have one other MAC address.

I hope this helped you guys! Follow if you want to see more, I have been thinking of writing about my experience in using CS skills to assist with travels. Also, check out our Van Building videos on YouTube.