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/

Installation

# From CRAN (once published)
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