Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Priv sep in ethereal

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From: "Mark Pizzolato" <ethereal-dev-20030907@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 04:45:06 -0800
On Tuesday, February 08, 2005 at 12:53 AM, Ulf Lamping wrote:

Stephen Samuel (leave the email alone) wrote:


I realize that the code may not be all that big, but when
deciding policies, my backup thought is 'what would happen if
*everybody* did this?"  Besides, if it adds capabilities for
non-priveledged processes, some people might consider this to
be a security issue.


That's the important point IMHO.

An administrator might not want users to capture from the network (for
whatever reason), so it should not enable this feature "accidentially"
as a default option.
Well, for all currently running Ethereal installations on windows, essentially everyone has been "enabling this feature accidentally" the first time anyone runs ethereal as an administrator. Almost no one realized this first invocation of ethereal caused the NPF driver to load and to be left running. 

Ultimately WinPcap should be enhanced to handle device permissioning better.
Meanwhile, if an administrator wants to achieve privilege separation on Windows (a very good thing), the best choice is to auto load NPF. Making this choice at install time would seem generally appropriate.
- Mark Pizzolato