Orbi WiFi 7 RBE973
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Smart Parental Controls and MAC filtering

Jamescbury
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Smart Parental Controls and MAC filtering

Hi, I have the Nighthawk RAX70 router.  I've paid for and enabled the "Smart Parental Controls" via the Nighthawk App and set up profiles for each of my kids.  It is incredibly easy for my 12 year old to bypass this by changing his MAC address, or by spoofing the MAC address of another device on the network that is always connected (i.e., one of our IP Cameras, or my work computer).

 

I had thought an easy fix to this would be MAC address filtering, but it appears that when you use SPC the access control option is no longer available in Advanced Settings.  Then I thought a work around would be to assign all new MAC addresses on my network to a default profile that is paused - this however doesn't seem possible and regardless either of the above solutions won't address the spoofing of an already assigned MAC address.

 

I'm open to any suggestions here (the easier the better) but I'm leaning toward setting up my own PKI certification authority and using OpenSSL, though I think this will be really painful with any connected devices that are not PCs or iPhones.  I've also looked into setting up a VLAN where I can have one password protected network always on and used to connect my always-on devices, and a second that requires a certificate or worst case scenario pauses all devices on some set schedule (like when my kid is supposed to be off of his computer). I don't have an issue turning the guest network on or off for the occasional guest device.

 

But this seems overly complex to me. I am disappointed that Netgear has me pay for a service (SPC) that doesn't really help me with parental controls.  If there is a way that Bitfender can help with this I'd love to hear it.

Message 1 of 4
Jamescbury
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Re: Smart Parental Controls and MAC filtering

Just curious if I'm the only person who runs into this issue with parental controls - perhaps there is something I'm missing?

Message 2 of 4
mjhalladey
Aspirant

Re: Smart Parental Controls and MAC filtering

I set parental control via a kid profile and one day they dont work. The kids can access any sites they want. I pay for this option to be activated and block them, but nope.

 

Message 3 of 4
amandamac
Aspirant

Re: Smart Parental Controls and MAC filtering

I'm trying to set up parental controls (paid subscription) and when trying to assign devices to each kid, I get no devices found. We have a modem and router. Is this anything you had to work around? It's a Mac modem. 

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