How to get device type from MAC or IP address?

Question

I am making a Device Discovery windows application in C#. Is this possible to know the device type if I have MAC address or IP address?

device type means either it is computer or router or mobile or any other device?

Note: HostName entry is not useful for it because Host Name is defined by User. for example i may assign "Nokia N70" name to my computer.

Thanks in anticipation.

Solution 1

You can get the manufacturer from the MAC address. In order to get any more information you'd need to do a port scan to do a 'fingerprint' of the device in question.

Application such as NMAP use this approach.

Solution 2

Non-spoofed MAC addresses do include a manufacturers string at the start, but I don't know of any publicly available database that holds them. There is also no device mapping after this.

The matter is even more complex when you add in the use of virtual machines, which require there own MAC address.

IP addresses, no they are assigned by network administrators however they want, often virtually random.

So in short no.

Comments

[Azeem Akram]

:: MAC address of the manufacturers as listed here, this is a piece of information i would like to tell. GO to this LINK :standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/oui.txt

[Azeem Akram]

:: Is there any example of Port scan?

[Ed Kirk]

Yeh, but you're still going to have problems, as I've added virtual machines will be an issue, so will routers that spoof MAC addresses for ISP configurations.

[John Strood]

Really? I can configure my laptop to use any mac address I want.

[Shai]

@Djack Cool for you, but what does that have to do with my answer?

[John Strood]

Of course it does. Mac addresses are no more "hardwired" to the device. Once I change it, there's no way you can match it against in your database.

[Shai]

@Djack a) this is not my database. b) he was asking if one could match between a mac address and a device type and the answer is yes, it's possible. If one spoofs his mac address it's a whole different story. So for basic home usage - the solution above works.