With macOS 15, Apple has added the “Private Wi-Fi address” feature that replaces the actual hardware MAC address with a fixed or rotating dynamic MAC address. BigFix appears to gather this information from the network stack, resulting in a response with the dynamic MAC address rather than the actual hardware address. Is there a way to inspect the actual hardware rather than the network stack?
I’m not sure, but iokit registry might have it. You can use the command line ioreg, and its man page, to start wrangling its data. There are discussions and examples of it on this forum, and BigFix.me.
You might also try dumping system_profiler SPNetworkDataType periodically to a file. There are output options for plist and json as well.
1 Like
Oh, and networksetup might be useful as well.
1 Like
So, I appear to have found it with an IORegistryExplorer. Now how to I get it out? Keys and entries and dictionaries, OH MY!
Any idea where the “AirPort_BrcmNIC” info is being stored in the IORegistry? I can get around the rest of it but have no idea where that is coming from…
BOOM!!
Q: ((data of value of it) of ( ((entries of it) whose (key of it is "IOMACAddress")) of dictionaries of nodes of nodes of nodes of ( ((nodes of it) whose (name of it is "RP01")) of ( nodes of ( ((nodes of it) whose (name of it is "PCI0")) of ((nodes of service plane of iokit registry) whose (name of it is "AppleACPIPlatformExpert")) ) ) ) )) as hexadecimal
A: 18810edce3ae
That’s the hardware MAC address.
3 Likes
I hate macOS. I really do.
Now, that works on MY mac. Does it work on others…