what would happend if I don´t use suid?

little_ball · 12-02-2004, 05:15 PM

How do I know which programs need suid or not? Or how do I know how dangerous could be if I modify one of them? I mean if I take off suid or sgid to that program, how I do know that it would still working?? I just want to know all the kind of facts that could happend, I´m learning things about Linux Security and that question came to my mind.

sigsegv · 12-02-2004, 05:28 PM

Generally speaking, things that are suid will still function fine so long as they're run by the user that they were originally suid for.

For example, /bin/ping is suid root. ping will work fine for root if it's not suid, but other users won't be able to use it, unless you let them have sudo access to it.