Is it possible to get the SSID & MAC Address of Currently connected WiFi Network in an App

Question

I am looking for a way to get both the MAC Adress and the SSID of the currently connected WiFi Network in my project. I have used Tony Million's Reachability to decide when the user is on a WiFi network or not and was testing Kenial's NICInfo only to find out that it only provides the iPhone's WiFi MAC Address. Although both projects helped greatly in there own way, they do not get the job done. I am wondering if there is a public API (for certain Apple App Approval) or some back door to achieve this.

Answer 1

This involves a few different things:

1. Getting SSID - This is independent of the MAC address issue. For this, check this SO answer: iPhone get SSID without private library. I don't know what the etiquette is regarding re-posting code from other answers so I'll just link.

2. Getting MAC address - since the majority of networking operates at Layer 3 (which is called, who would have guessed, the Network Layer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) and the MAC address is at Layer 2 (the Data Link layer) you'll first need to get the IP address of the gateway of the WiFi interface. Just a side note - the question should be phrased as 'How do I get the SSID of the currently connected WiFi network and the MAC address of the WiFi router/gateway'. Anywho, to get the gateway address, see this SO answer: How to get the WIFI gateway address on the iPhone?

   Once you have that, you need to convert it to a MAC address using ARP (Address Resolution Protocol, which is the protocol that all networks use to convert IP addresses to MAC addresses). Network interfaces don't communicate via IP, they communicate via MAC, so this actually happens everywhere, all the time. It's actually pretty easy to access the ARP table on a PC/Mac. For iOS, I found this SO answer to convert an IP address to a MAC address: Getting ARP table on iPhone/iPad