Search device using MAC address - arp

I want to check presence of a device in network. The IP address of device keeps on changing. Is there any way I can search device through MAC address.
Through ARP I can ping the device but as IP keep on changing, I am thinking get device through MAC address.
Is there any mechanism to search device through MAC.

On Linux, you can use a tool called arp-scan.

Not sure what you tried so far.
arp -s < IP address > < MAC address >
There is an interesting article published by Microsoft
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc961394.aspx

Related

Send message using MAC address on PC without IP in LAN

Need to send messages on PC without configured IP using MAC address in C language as a reply on PC's broadcast message. I suppose I should work with ethernet-header and use some (linux) kernel's structures and subroutines, however I couldn't find good links and samples about my question.
Example of sending a raw Ethernet frame in Linux:
https://gist.github.com/austinmarton/1922600

Programmatically get IP of directly connected device

Using C I am trying to discover the IP of a locally connected device without knowing any information about the device.
[ my box ]--eth0--------------[ unknown device ]
I can't seem to find a way to arp/broadcast to get the IP of the device. I understand that if I use multicast the device itself has to be a member of the group. When I arp or arp-scan they ask me to assign my eth0 interface an IP but I don't have one assigned, I can put one if I need to but I am unsure what it needs to be set to in order to discover anything.
Example: I have a Linksys wireless IP camera and I want to find the IP/Subnet. Without knowing its subnet/netmask I wouldn't know what to set my eth0 to.
I have written a C program to parse the arp table in Linux but I cannot seem to get the IP from the locally connected device in it. As mentioned above, I cannot use these tools without setting eth0 to something.
I think Your best chance to find something is by capturing all incoming network traffic, especially while unknown device is booting (using tcpdump, wireshark or something similar). Just filter out traffic, which is sent from my box.
Most likely You'll see DHCP requests and maybe ARP requests. If device is using DHCP, the easyest solution would be to run DHCP server on eth0 (so You can assign IP to this device).
If for some reason You need to program in C (and network capture gives expected results), libpcap may be usefull.
If evrything else fails, You can try to dicover unknown IP using fake ARP packets (so You don't need to change IP on eth0) and capturing any responses.

How can I extract mac address from a icmp reply in c on linux

I am trying to find out mac address of a machine in a switched environment after sending it a raw packet. I am trying to implement traceroute command . I want to know when i receive a ICMP time exceeded message how can I extract the mac address of that machine . I am a new to network programming so am confused what socket call will help me to extract the mac address.
Thanks .
No, you can not extract MAC address from ICMP reply.
You can only determine MAC addresses of linked machines next to you. In ICMP(tracert) you can just find out the IP address of target or middle machine.
If you want to detect MAC addresses, you should use ARP protcols where it's applicable in local networks not Internet.
ICMP protocol starts after IPv4 header[1] and MAC addresses is related to physical/link layer. In low level layers the MAC addresses will transparent from top level layers such as network(IP) or Transmission,...
To determining MAC addresses, you should use Raw sockets or PCAP SDKs to access lower layers of network programming. (I say again, these are not useful over Internet)
Like Masoud M said, you can only get the MAC address of machines that are on your local network. That said, you can parse the output the arp command to find the MAC address given the IP address of a machine one your local network.
In general, on internet, you don't even know the media a host is using for transmitting packets. Let's suppose a remote host is conected over a serial rs-232-C link with PPP protocol. It doesn't have a mac address. This also happens for example if the host uses a token ring interface or frame relay link. This makes determining the remote mac addresses of hosts a local issue completely. Normally, when you get a packet from a remote site over ethernet, the source mac addres you get in the packet is the one of the last router that links you to the internet, not the one of the original host that sent the IP packet. In the RFC on IP over avian carriers (rfc1149, rfc2549 and rfc6214) the media used for transmission doesn't allow to use mac addresses (the link address, if somewhat feasible on a pidgeon could be, would be its name)
If you want to read about traceroute on ethernet network of switches, perhaps you had to have a look at the IEEE802.1ag, that has an specification to do tracerouting over switches (tracelink service) but I think is far over the scope of this answer.

Verify TCP connection is from same machine by MAC address

Please don't criticise the solution. It's not my design and yes, it sucks.
On a computer running Linux, and using C, we need to verify that a TCP connection made to a process is from the same machine. Doing it by IP address is problematic since the OS is generating two IP addresses and the process only knows one. Anyway, verifying by IP address is a bit poor.
We want to do the verification by comparing the "remote" MAC address to the local MAC address. We already get the local MAC address. All I need to know is how to get the "remote" MAC address. It's in the packet that gets sent when forming the connection (and in all subsequent ones too). How do we drag it out of the ethernet layer?
Before anyone says this again, I KNOW you cannot get the MAC address of the remote host if it's not on the same subnet/LAN. That's fine. Presumably we'll get something like 00:00:00:00:00:00 and since that is different to the local MAC address it will be different - just what we want.
--
So, to summarise, we have a TCP connection socket fd, we've received a data packet, how do we then find the MAC address of the remote host, the MAC address that was in the packet's header?
If I understand correctly, you are not trying to tell remote machines apart, but to use the idea that the source and destination MAC would match on traffic sent from a machine to itself in order to allow only local traffic.
This seems rather roundabout, and has been pointed out, insecure.
A somewhat better idea might be to have the TCP client listen only on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1) and not on INADDR_ANY. Or go a step further and use a unix-domain socket instead of a TCP one (a common method used by X servers today to prevent the possibility of remote connections)
The MAC address of a live same-subnet TCP connection will almost certainly be in the ARP cache.
On Linux, you could examine the ARP cache by looking in /proc/net/arp. Here is what it looks like on my Ubuntu box:
aix#aix:~$ cat /proc/net/arp
IP address HW type Flags HW address Mask Device
10.0.0.32 0x1 0x2 00:1e:4f:f5:be:dc * eth0
10.10.10.1 0x1 0x2 00:1f:6c:3e:02:e3 * eth0
There's probably some callable API that you could use to get to the same data if you're averse to parsing the pseudo-file.
How about configuring a firewall (internal or external) to block or MAC-filter external traffic on the port in question?
A loopback connection (whether it's over the loopback interface or some other interface) it not routed over any ethernet device and therefore does not have a MAC address associated with it.
I suggest you just use getsockname and getpeername to get the local and remote IP address and compare that they are equal. That will work without any a priori knowledge of the configured IP addresses of your system.
Further, if you want to be IPv4/v6 agnostic, you could use getnameinfo with the NI_NUMERIC flag to convert both addresses to numeric string representations and strcmp them.

Programmatic use of ARP

I have a need for some C or C++ code, compilable under Linux, to be able to take a list of IP addresses of some arbitrary number of remote hosts machines and obtain a ethernet MAC address for each one. These host machines may be on the same subnet or they could be on a different subnet behind a router. Its OK if the MAC address of some or all of the remote hosts is the address of the interface on the router. Ultimately, I want to hand off the IP address and MAC address to an FPGA who will use these pieces of information to format and send UDP/IP packets over ethernet to the hosts. Obviously, the FPGA will also be given its own MAC address and IP address to fill in the source MAC and source IP addresses in the packets.
Is there some code I can be pointed to that can create and broadcast ARP packets to these remote machines and receive back the ARP response packets such that the destination MAC addresses can be extracted?
Part of what you want to do requires some raw socket programming.
http://mixter.void.ru/rawip.html
The source for the linux arp command will give the rest of what you need. Here's a link:
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs4236/readings/out/html/arp_8c-source.html
I recommend looking into arping which is doing a somewhat identical job. It takes IPs and MACs and tries to receive additional informationen. Or justs pings them.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/arping/

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