NetworkManager resets spoofed mac address to physical mac

[Paul Khomyakov]

Ubuntu 16.04 bumped NetworkManager to version 1.1.93. Unlike 15.10 (with v1.0.4) and earlier NetworkManager now resets temporary mac of an interface to actual physical mac effectively disabling typical wifi anonymization technics.

Same issue is present in just released NetworkManager 1.2.

It appears that sometime between 1.0.10 and 1.1.93 there was a change in src/devices/wifi/nm-device-wifi.c from

 /* Set spoof MAC to the interface */
 cloned_mac = nm_setting_wireless_get_cloned_mac_address (s_wireless);
 if (cloned_mac)
  nm_device_set_hw_addr (device, cloned_mac, "set", LOGD_WIFI);
to

 /* Set spoof MAC to the interface */
 cloned_mac = nm_setting_wireless_get_cloned_mac_address (s_wireless);
 nm_device_set_hw_addr (device, cloned_mac, "set", LOGD_WIFI);

cloned_mac is NULL if not specified in NetworkManager GUI. When called with NULL nm_device_set_hw_addr sets the mac to physical mac of the interface.

[Aron Xu (happyaron)]

This would be great to report upstream as a feature request.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Looking upstream it seems similar to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=770611