Get main board product name without sudo

Hi,

I have found two ways to get the main board product name:

1. sudo lshw
2. sudo dmidecode

Is it the nature of this info that's making it protected or is it the source code of these tools?

Is there any way to get main board product name without sudo?

Cheers

Prashant

Originally Posted by tank junior Is it the nature of this info that's making it protected or is it the source code of these tools?

These tools lshw and dmidecode have source that is freely available.

The issue is that the information is being gathered using access to real memory (for example, from BIOS tables). Since having direct access to memory allows access to the whole system, it cannot be granted openly to user applications.

It is true that some of the information is not security critical, and in theory it could be made available to user programs (eg either by granting limited memory access rights, or indirectly through /proc). But in most cases anyone able to make use of this information has full access to the machine anyway.

Thanks neonsignal,

Shall I start digging inside the source code of these tools to check if I could retrieve the baseboard product name without sudo or is there any other alternative.

In any case if this particular piece of info needs some kind of rights then I'll drop the idea of using it.

Prashant

Originally Posted by tank junior Shall I start digging inside the source code of these tools to check if I could retrieve the baseboard product name without sudo

No point, they probably just access /dev/mem.

I don't know of another way of getting this information from a non-privileged application. You can run lshw without sudo, and it will report as much as it can, but not the motherboard info from the BIOS.

Thanks neonsignal,

I am relatively new in linux world. I don't know if it's common or restricted that when you install either open source or commercial apps and you have to assign some rights to their executable so that they can access private info, provided source of app is authenticated.

Prashant

Originally Posted by tank junior I don't know if it's common or restricted that when you install either open source or commercial apps and you have to assign some rights to their executable so that they can access private info, provided source of app is authenticated.

No, it isn't. For applications that come from a standard repository (eg the repository of the particular distribution), the installation process itself will normal take care of any access that is required. Some larger applications (such as a web server) may require some additional configuration, but most will work 'out of the box'. The bulk of applications simply operate at the user's privilege level.

For third party applications, installation can sometimes be a little more complex, since it may not be customized for the particular distribution.

If you find that an application does not have the access that you want, there is usually a good security reason for it. So although it is relatively easy in Linux to increase the privileges of an executable, it should only be done with great caution (and rarely if ever). Even if the application is known to be trustworthy, does not mean that you want it to have system wide access, since an untrusted user might misuse the application as a means of cracking the system (this is true whatever operating system you are running).