LinkLiar

 Link-Layer MAC spoofing GUI for macOS .

Prevent your Mac from leaking MACs

This is an intuitive macOS status menu application written in Swift to help you spoof the MAC addresses of your Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces. It is free open-source.

➡️ How do I install this?

If you star this project (by clicking on ✭ in the top-right corner), you help me to prioritize among my open-source projects.

Requirements

• macOS Sierra (10.12) or later (see releases for older versions).
• Administrator privileges (you will be asked for your root password once).

Installation

If you have Homebrew, just run brew install --cask linkliar.

To install it manually, follow these instructions in the documentation.

Documentation

What you're looking at right now is the technical documentation.

The end-user documentation is located at halo.github.io/LinkLiar.

There is also a source-code documentation in progress, see bin/docs for inspiration.

Limitations/Caveats

• When your Wi-Fi (aka Airport) is turned off, you cannot change its MAC address. You need to turn it on first.
• If you change a MAC address while the interface is connected, you will briefly loose connection.
• If you rapidly close and open your MacBook, the MAC address may change while the Wi-Fi connection remains and you loose the connection (that is, if you have configured LinkLiar to re-randomize the MAC address).
• Whenever you successfully changed your MAC address, your System Preferences will still show you the original hardware MAC address. This is normal behavior and your actual network traffic uses the new, changed MAC address.
• 2018 MacBooks cannot change their MAC address, because of a bug in macOS.
• As of macOS 12.3 (Monterey), the MAC address of an interface cannot be modified while connected to a network. That's why LinkLiar will disassociate from any connected network before modifying the MAC address.

Troubleshooting

You can create this logfile and whenever it exists, all LinkLiar components will write to it:

touch "/Library/Application Support/LinkLiar/linkliar.log"

Delete the log file again to silence logging.

Once LinkLiar is started and the menu is visible, you can hold the Option ⌥ key for advanced options. This is only intended for developers.

If you want a more colorful output, clone this git repository and run bin/logs. That's what I use when I'm debugging. This utility is also bundled in LinkLiar so you can run it with

# Run this in a Terminal for live debugging logs.
/Applications/LinkLiar.app/Contents/Resources/logs

Development

HelpBook

To update the HelpBook (end-user documentation), change the source files in LinkLiarHelp/en.lproj and then generate the output with bin/docs.

from https://github.com/halo/LinkLiar

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LinkLiar Handbook

This is an intuitive status menu application written in Swift to help you spoof the MAC addresses of your Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces.

📱 What is a MAC address and why would I change it?

When you turn on the Wi-Fi of your MacBook, it sends out a unique identifier - its MAC address (this has nothing to do with Apple’s “Mac”). Everyone nearby may freely collect this unique identifier and use it to track your movement.

Did you know that your phone does not send out its Wi-Fi identifier, but rather a random, fake one? This is to protect you from the common practice of businesses to track your movements when you walk around in stores.

With LinkLiar you can achieve the same privacy for your MacBook. Though the MAC address is hardwired into your Wi-Fi network card, you are free to modify it.

🐷 Can I trust this app?

I’m an independent developer who invested some time into creating this app. It is open source, so you have full insight into how it works. Click on the Octocat in the top right corner to find out more.

If you’re concerned with giving this application administrator privileges, you should build it from scratch using Xcode.

🔩 Is this app maintained?

Every now and then I find the time to develop new features. If you’d like to motivate me, open this project on Github and give it a ★ in the top right corner. It helps me prioritize among my projects.

🔦 Which other apps are out there?

Your MacBook already ships with the tool to change your MAC address. You would just have to enter ifconfig en0 ether aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff in a Terminal. But that’s cumbersome, so tools like LinkLiar are supposed to make it easier for you.

For macOS, the more prominent graphical apps are Airpass (open source), WiFiSpoof (commercial) and MacDaddyX (free). Then there is the command line tool SpoofMAC, which unfortunately has no graphical interface.

🕹 What’s it with the name?

The MAC address is sometimes referred to as the link-layer address. You figure out the pun :]

💕 Special Thanks

The icon in the status bar was created by the never-tired iconmonstr (I slightly modified it).

▶️ What’s next?

Learn where to download LinkLiar…

from https://halo.github.io/LinkLiar/