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I can't think why ping should need setuid; having the capability for opening a raw socket would be enough, I think. (Unless I misunderstand how capabilities wor

I can't think why ping should need setuid; having the capability for opening a raw socket would be enough, I think. (Unless I misunderstand how capabilities work, but this seems to suffice for Wireshark.)

wolfgang42 10y ago
My Ubuntu Xenial system has /bin/ping as '-rwsr-xr-x' and getcap reports nothing. On the other hand raw(7) says "Only processes with an effective user ID of 0 or the CAP_NET_RAW capability are allowed to open raw sockets" so I would expect setuid to not be needed any more. I assume Canonical has a reason for setting it up this way though I've no idea what that reason is. UNIX-derived systems tend to have a habit of requiring root for anything that even remotely might want to be restricted: the example that comes to mind is reserving ports 0-1024 for root, thus requiring that most daemons to start as root instead of an unprivileged user.
- girvo 10y ago
  There's a nice capability that allows non-root binaries to use low ports, too!