Bug#778924: ITP: linssid -- graphical wireless scanner

[Timo Juhani Lindfors <timo.lindfors@iki.fi>]

Hi,

Eriberto Mota <eriberto@debian.org> writes:
> I did a patch to force the program runs as root only and ignore the
> internal sudo commands. In manpage (created by me) , I explained how
> to use gksudo to run the program. The icon on desktop menu uses gksudo
> too. You can see the current packaging here[1].

Thanks for working on this. Running the UI as root is not very nice
either but definitely better than leaking user's password.

Are root privileges really needed? The commands that linssid runs seem
to be "iw dev" and "cat /proc/net/wireless". Both of these seem to
return the same output as normal user here:

oregano:~$ sudo iw dev
phy#0
        Interface wlan0
                  ifindex 3
                          type managed
oregano:~$ sudo cat /proc/net/wireless
Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               |
Missed | WE
 face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc |
 beacon | 22
 wlan0: 0000   49.  -61.  -256        0      0      0      0     30
 0


oregano:~$ /sbin/iw dev
phy#0
        Interface wlan0
                  ifindex 3
                          type managed
oregano:~$ cat /proc/net/wireless
Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               |
Missed | WE
 face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc |
 beacon | 22
 wlan0: 0000   55.  -55.  -256        0      0      0      0     30
 0

Is there some other functionality that actually needs root privileges?



-Timo