The results of your email commands

[Ganesh Hegde <ganesh.hegde.samartha () gmail com>]

Hi,

In one of the projects, we are faced with the requirement of detecting
the OS on remote machines and displaying the information in a table on
a web page. We decided to use a PHP script to run the nmap tool.
Although, I don't have the complete source code of the script, it's
enough to say that one of the lines in the script is:
nmap -O host-ip-address

The problem we faced was that this script wouldn't work if the process
running the script didn't have super-user privileges. The only
workaround I could think was changing the permission of the nmap
program to setuid-to-root. The OS on which the script runs is Linux.

1. In this situation what are the security concerns we need to be aware of?
2. Is there an alternate way of remotely detecting OS without using
the setuid to root permission for nmap?


Warm Regards,
--Ganesh
_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/