Re: [ethereal-dev] Security race in ethereal leading to root access

[Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, Guy Harris wrote:

> A third possibility would be to use two processes even if you're not
> using "-F" or "-S"; this means we wouldn't need two versions of the code
> for the running-capture dialog box, *and* it'd probably let us clean up
> the capture handling somewhat - we wouldn't have to have the capture
> loop handle GTK+ events, we'd just tell GTK+ to add the pipe file
> descriptor as an input descriptor, and update the display
> (running-capture dialog box and, for "-S", packet display window) when
> we got input on that descriptor (the "only update once a second" stuff
> would be done by the child process - it'd send messages up to the parent
> only when it wanted the parent to update the display).

A permanent, separate capture process also lends itself to a better
security model.  After the capture process has been forked, the parent
process doesn't necessarily need root priveleges.

> That has the disadvantage of doing context switches even if you're not
> doing a "-S" capture, though.