MAC.address

R tools to work with MAC (Media Access Control) addresses:

• list the MAC addresses of the local network interfaces and of the devices in the ARP cache (Linux, macOS, Windows),
• extract MAC addresses from free text,
• validate and normalize their notation, check the multicast and locally administered bits, generate random addresses and derive IPv6 identifiers,
• identify the manufacturer using the public IEEE OUI registries.

Documentation: https://enriqueph.github.io/mac-address/

CRAN: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=MAC.address

Installation

# From CRAN
install.packages("MAC.address")

# Development version, from GitHub
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("EnriquePH/mac-address")

Usage

library(MAC.address)

# MAC addresses of this device, named by interface
get_MAC()
#>            enp3s0f1              wlp2s0
#> "9C:5C:8E:27:D8:13" "10:02:B5:39:B7:C3"

# Extract MAC addresses from text (colon, hyphen and Cisco dotted notation)
txt <- "eth0 1c:4c:7e:30:d8:13, wlan0 00-1A-2B-3C-4D-5E, switch 001a.2b3c.4d5f"
search_MAC(txt)
#> [1] "1C:4C:7E:30:D8:13" "00-1A-2B-3C-4D-5E" "001A.2B3C.4D5F"
search_MAC(txt, normalize = TRUE)
#> [1] "1C:4C:7E:30:D8:13" "00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E" "00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5F"

# Validate and normalize
is_MAC(c("1C:4C:7E:30:D8:13", "1C:4C:7E:30:D8"))
#> [1]  TRUE FALSE
normalize_MAC("1c4c.7e30.d813", sep = "-")
#> [1] "1C-4C-7E-30-D8-13"

# Manufacturer lookup (downloads the IEEE registries once, then uses a cache)
lookup_vendor(get_MAC())
#> [1] "ASUSTek COMPUTER INC." "Intel Corporate"

# Randomized / virtual addresses are locally administered, not IEEE assigned
is_local_MAC("DA:A1:19:00:00:00")
#> [1] TRUE
is_multicast_MAC("01:00:5E:00:00:FB")
#> [1] TRUE

# Devices in the local network (ARP cache) and their manufacturer
arp <- get_arp_table()
arp$vendor <- lookup_vendor(arp$mac)
arp
#>            ip               mac interface        vendor
#> 1 192.168.1.1 D4:61:95:EE:14:71    wlp2s0 zte corporation

# Random locally administered addresses, e.g. for virtual machines
set.seed(1)
random_MAC(2)
#> [1] "FA:80:D6:D1:E0:69" "42:A1:2A:BA:54:B5"

# IPv6 link-local address derived from a MAC (modified EUI-64)
eui64_MAC("1C:4C:7E:30:D8:13", link_local = TRUE)
#> [1] "fe80::1e4c:7eff:fe30:d813"

Functions

Function	Description
get_MAC()	MAC addresses of the local network interfaces
get_arp_table()	IP and MAC addresses of the neighbors in the ARP cache
search_MAC()	Extract MAC addresses from text
is_MAC()	Check whether strings are valid MAC addresses
normalize_MAC()	Convert to a common notation (XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX by default)
is_local_MAC()	Check the locally administered bit
is_multicast_MAC()	Check the multicast (group) bit
random_MAC()	Generate random (by default locally administered) addresses
eui64_MAC()	IPv6 modified EUI-64 identifier and link-local address
get_oui_registry()	Download (and cache) the IEEE MA-L, MA-M and MA-S registries
lookup_vendor()	Organization that owns each MAC address block

Development

Documentation is written with roxygen2 comments in R/ (Markdown enabled). Never edit man/ or NAMESPACE by hand:

devtools::document()   # regenerate man/ and NAMESPACE
devtools::test()       # run the tests
devtools::check()      # full R CMD check

Code style is checked with lintr, configured in .lintr (function names like get_MAC() are allowed). Load the package first, so that functions defined in other files are recognized:

devtools::load_all()
lintr::lint_package()

References

• IEEE Registration Authority: https://regauth.standards.ieee.org/standards-ra-web/pub/view.html#registries
• MA-L (OUI) registry: https://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.csv
• MA-M registry: https://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui28/mam.csv
• MA-S registry: https://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui36/oui36.csv
• RFC 4291, appendix A (modified EUI-64): https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4291#appendix-A

License

MIT © Enrique Pérez Herrero