1

Is it possible for a NIC/ network adapter to communicate with internet if it is not assigned a MAC address ?

Improve this question
4
  • 1
    It's a requirement for Ethernet, so pretty much yes. I doubt you will be able to get your NIC to function without one set.
    – deed02392
    Feb 22, 2014 at 14:20
  • please mention it as an answer and provide reference if any
    – user2917687
    Feb 22, 2014 at 14:46
  • 1
    I think this question is a better fit on Superuser. Although a good question, it's not a question about information security. Your question may be migrated though (you can even flag it for migration), don't post a duplicate.
    – Luc
    Feb 22, 2014 at 15:15
  • No your Network device cannot communicate without a mac address. Have a read on TCP/IP model work and
    – Ali Ahmad
    Feb 23, 2014 at 14:09

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

I think the answer is no, it's not compulsory, but I'm not sure. It seems that when using a point-to-point protocol, you don't need a MAC address, but you can access the Internet (IP layer goes on top of PPP).

Storytime:

At school we had some lessons in network infrastructure. Everyone needed to use the school's virtual machine environment to do certain exercises, but of course since 60 people are using it at once, it's slow and annoying. A few of us ran it on their own laptops or had a VPS and used that instead.

One of the exercises was looking up the current ARP table with arp -a. This worked fine on all our laptops (Windows, Mac and Linux), but the VPS had issues. There did not seem to be any arp table at all!

We called the teacher and to our surprise, he had an answer: Because the VPS connected over a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), it didn't need an arp table because it didn't use ethernet at all. The IP protocol was used on top of PPP instead of on top of Ethernet.

This is all from memory and I hardly know anything about PPP (or any of its variants like PPPoE), but this is why I think the answer is no.

Improve this answer
2
  • Wow, I wish my school dared teach us anything so interesting in Computing.
    – deed02392
    Feb 22, 2014 at 15:55
  • @deed02392 I wish too ;). They didn't exactly tell us that on their own. We just happened to come across it and, by some miracle, the teacher (who is incredibly bad at explaining anything to anyone) happened to know this one fact. We have yet to figure out something else he knows besides what he attempts to teach.
    – Luc
    Feb 22, 2014 at 21:38
2

No, although your teacher worded the question in such a way that a pedant might find fringe outlier cases where the answer would be yes.

If we assume that you are on an Ethernet network which is connected to the Internet, then yes, @deed02392 is correct, a MAC address will be a requirement, as per the IEEE 802.3 standards - for example:

Ethernet is specified at selected speeds of operation; and uses a common media access control (MAC) specification and management information base (MIB).

While dominant, however, Ethernet is not the only network standard out there, and gateways permit diverse networks to talk. While I'm not familiar with one offhand, there's likely a network protocol out there that does not have a "media access control". Put a gateway in place that can talk to the Internet and boom, you have an adapter that can connect to the Internet without a MAC address.

If you can find an example of such a protocol I suspect that'll be worth extra credit. Look at full-duplex point-to-point protocols where the whole media access thing isn't an issue, for the obvious reason.

Good luck!

Improve this answer
4
  • is ethernet standard used by wifi also ? apart from lan
    – user2917687
    Mar 1, 2014 at 13:26
  • 2
    While 802.11 is often called "Wireless Ethernet", it's an equivalent of 802.3, not a child protocol. Nevertheless, it also uses MAC addresses - see IEEE 802.11
    – gowenfawr
    Mar 1, 2014 at 14:50
  • Re: 'While I'm not familiar with one offhand, there's likely a network protocol out there that does not have a "media access control"'. This is speculative and actually false. See Why do we still use Ethernet for more discussion
    – Mike Pennington
    Mar 1, 2014 at 18:54
  • 1
    PPP doesn't have MAC addresses. ATM and Token Ring do. Fibre Channel does not, it has something called a World Wide Name (WWN) which is similar in nature but different in size. So, no, it's not false.
    – Alan Shutko
    Mar 1, 2014 at 19:06

You must log in to answer this question.