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I have two traceroute programs installed and I've noticed that they don't have the same permissions:

~$ ls -l /usr/bin/inetutils-traceroute 
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 60184 August 23, 2023 /usr/bin/inetutils-traceroute

~$ ls -l /usr/bin/traceroute.db
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 72944 25 feb 2023 /usr/bin/traceroute.db

You can see that traceroute.db doesn't have the special permission "s" and that's why I installed inetutils-traceroute which allows me to use the -I option as a user. But this program comes with a lot of other programs that I don't need at all.

So my question is: can I safely add this special "s" permission to traceroute.db so as to keep only the original package installed by Debian?

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  • are you root? you should be able to set SetUID if you are. its entirely a different question as to whether the app runs properly that way. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Apr 24 at 15:19
  • setting SETUID is not a problem, the question is: if I do it, am I taking a risk? If I only could understand why Debian add a special permission to inetutils-traceroute but not to traceroute?
    – mazda
    Commented Apr 24 at 15:37
  • on its face, yes it should be safe. not sure it will work, but as long as there are no privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the implementation, it should be fine.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Apr 24 at 18:12

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