Re: The results of your email commands

["DePriest, Jason R." <jrdepriest () gmail com>]

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 5:38 AM, Ganesh Hegde <> wrote:
> 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

Greetings, Ganesh,

There is not a way to run proper operating system detection without
running as root (or setuid to root).

The types of packets nmap needs to create in order to generate the
responses for detection require root privileges.

I don't know too much about running nmap as setuid root since I
normally run it manually with sudo.  I guess you'd need to secure it
however you would normally secure a powerful program.

-Jason
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