Bug 387706

Summary:	wireshark administrator privilege requires AND Running as user "root" and group "root". This could be dangerous.
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.0	Reporter:	Casual J. Programmer <casualprogrammer>
Component:	Network	Assignee:	Pavol Rusnak <prusnak>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Factory
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86
OS:	openSUSE 11.0
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Beta-Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Casual J. Programmer 2008-05-07 12:11:42 UTC

After a clean network install & update from factory running wireshark from the gnome main menu results in an authentication box challenging with the root password. After that is entered a message box appears, stating that this could be dangerous.

This doesn't look right somehow.

wireshark-1.0.0-9
gnome-main-menu-0.9.10-13

Comment 1 Stephan Kulow 2008-05-08 07:01:17 UTC

well, it can't run as user as it's sniffing.

Comment 2 Casual J. Programmer 2008-05-08 07:20:28 UTC

That's not exactly what I suggest. If it is supposed to be forcibly run as root, then the message about how this is dangerous should be removed.

As packeted software can only be installed by root anyway, this should be left to whoever installs it. 

There are quite a few packages that warn against running them as root ( I am too casual to understand the reasoning ), so there seems to be a valid case to run them as user.

The proper solution would then be to create a group for this kind of application and add users that are supposed to run the software to that group.

Comment 3 Pavol Rusnak 2008-05-08 08:00:50 UTC

It was already discussed with security-team. They do not want to create another user group. 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 349782 ***