Mac Address Sniffer

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
1

I am wondering if it would be possible to use an arduino as a simple mac address sniffer?

We are using a mac address filter on our network and need to registered the mac address of all devices that will connect to the network. It would be rather handy to have a box we could connect to the network port of a device and have it display the mac address of that device.

I am guessing that I would need to start ethernet in server mode and then read the data that the connected device is broadcasting, but I didn't see any libraries that parsed that information in to anything useful. Is there a function to read the mac address of a connected computer?

2

Interesting project...

However, it might be a lot easier to read the ARP cache on a PC on the LAN, right after having pinged all addresses on the LAN.
(OK I know that not all devices on a lan necessarily replies to a ping, but anyway...)

Get the tool Angry IP scanner: http://www.angryip.org/

scan the network segment you want to collect the MAC addresses from and ping them all.
When done, open a command prompt and type the command: arp -a

You should now get a list of all the hosts that replied to the ping from the IP scanner, along with their physical addresses (MAC).

:wink:

The arduino way sounds more fun to build though! XD