Why You Shouldn’t Use MAC Address Filtering On Your Wi-Fi Router

MAC address filtering allows you to define a list of devices and only allow those devices on your Wi-Fi network. That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, this protection is tedious to set up and easy to breach.

This is one of the Wi-Fi router features that will give you a false sense of security. Just using WPA2 encryption is enough. Some people like using MAC address filtering, but it’s not a security feature.

Each device you own comes with a unique media access control address (MAC address) that identifies it on a network. Normally, a router allows any device to connect — as long as it knows the appropriate passphrase. With MAC address filtering a router will first compare a device’s MAC address against an approved list of MAC addresses and only allow a device onto the Wi-Fi network if its MAC address has been specifically approved.