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CompTIA Network+ 1.1 Cisco CCNA 1.13 Cisco CCST Networking 4.5
InteractiveNetworkFree

Read the MAC Address

Count the digits, spot the bad character, rewrite the separators. Fill each blank.

⚑ Complete this interactive to capture a CTF flag worth 5 points.

About this interactive

From the lesson: a MAC address is 48 bits, burned into the network card by the card's maker. Nobody can read 48 ones and zeros, so it is written in hexadecimal. - Each hex digit stands for 4 bits, so 48 bits are **12 hex digits**, and each pair of digits is 8 bits, one byte: **6 bytes**. - Hex digits are **0 to 9 and A to F**. Any other letter means it is not a MAC address. - The pairs are split by **colons or dashes** (Windows uses dashes). The separator, and capital or lower-case letters, do not change the address: they are only there so people can read it. - **FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF**, all 48 bits set to 1, is the broadcast address: every device that receives a frame sent to it processes it.

What you'll learn

Aligned to

CompTIA Network+
1.1 Explain concepts related to the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model.
Cisco CCNA
1.13 Describe switching concepts
Cisco CCST Networking
4.5 Explain basic switching concepts

Key terms

MAC Address
A 48-bit hardware address assigned to a network interface and written as six hexadecimal octets, such as 00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E. It identifies a device uniquely on a local network segment, and switches forward frames by looking it up in their MAC address table.
Hexadecimal
Hex
A base-16 number system using digits 0–9 and letters A–F; each hex digit maps to exactly 4 bits, making it a compact shorthand for representing binary data.
Burned-In Address
BIA
A MAC address permanently assigned to a network interface card by its manufacturer at the time of production.
Broadcast
A transmission type in which one device sends a single packet that is delivered to every other device on the local network segment simultaneously. Broadcast traffic is contained within a broadcast domain and does not cross router boundaries.

Topics

Mac Address Hexadecimal Burned In Address Interactive Fill In

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