Wireshark mailing list archives

Re: Wireshark needs root privileges?


From: Jakub Zawadzki <darkjames () darkjames ath cx>
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 18:13:49 +0200

On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 11:50:54AM -0400, Jeff Morriss wrote:
Dotan Cohen wrote:
Despite warnings about running Wireshark as root, on my Ubuntu 9.10
system the app sees no network interfaces unless I run it as root. Is
this normal? I've googled for "Ubuntu wireshark" and it does seem that
self-styled journalists (blogs) recommend running as root, but I do
not trust them for best practices.

On most OS[1] you need "root" (or similar) privileges in order to open 
the network device in a manner that allows you to capture packets. 
Running Wireshark (the GUI) as root is strongly discouraged: since 1.0 
Wireshark has had a separate utility (dumpcap) that contains all the 
packet capture code: only that utility needs to run as root, allowing 
you to run the multiple million lines of code in the bulk of Wireshark 
as a normal user.

What about dropping root privilages after invoking dumpcap?
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