I've just joined Vodafone Broadband and one of the key selling points was the Secure Net service. However, I'm struggling with the service as it seems to rely on the MAC address of the connected device to assign it to profiles - but this address is getting very unreliable for a couple of reasons:
1. Windows 11 has an option "Random Hardware Addresses" which create random MAC addresses. It even has an option "change daily" to keep changing it.
2. iPhones have, for a while now, had an option called 'Private Wi-Fi Address' which creates a random address in any wifi network it joins. In IOS18 a new "rotating" feature means it also will keep changing. I think Android also has this feature.
The upshot of both these new features means that any parental control will simply "drop out" whenever the address changes. It means you will believe your children are being kept safe when they are not - making Secure Net useless.
This issue is compounded with another problem - Secure Net makes it really difficult to work out what the device is when trying to assign to a profile. There is an arbitary name created but it is not clear where this comes from and it seems really unreliable. I've attached a couple of screenshots of my App - as you can see... it's really difficult to know what device is what (what is "PC" for example!!). It would help if the MAC and IP were also shown, but they are not. When logging into the router locally, you can see a little better which device is on which network, and also set the name (as you can check the assigned IP with what the device IP is showing). However, this name does not get sent to the Secure Net, so it is pointless doing this as it doesn't help in any way.
To make Secure Net for Broadband usable I believe needs these changes:
1. A toggle option to reject any private MAC address on the router DHCP server - this should force devices to fallback to their hardware MAC which is "burnt into" the network card on the device and will not change. It is easy to block private MACs... if the second character in a MAC address is a 2, 6, A, or E it is a randomized address.
2. Get a better method of identifying devices in the Secure Net app so it is easy to tell which device is which. It would even be worth having some kind of "captive portal" function to be available in the router which would allow you to get more device info before you allow the device to connect (although this would maybe need to be on guest wifi only as IOT devices in the home would not be able to respond).
3. A toggle option with a default 'deny' to any new MAC address requesting to connect. Then in the App there would be a 'needs a profile' option where you can review new MAC addresses and assign them to a profile (or assign as no profile needed for IOT devices, and parent devices). This would mean if your kids have set the "change daily" option on their device you would keep getting new requests - but eventually they would switch it off when they realise it isn't letting them bypass Secure Net!!
I would be interested to know if the Secure Net team are looking into these issues and whether there are going to be improvements to the service to combat this whole private MAC issue. Otherwise, the service is untrustworthy - which for parents is worse than having nothing at all.
