Enterprise Cloud Security and Governance

Understanding the permission associated with ping

Let's look into the permission associated with the ping command:

ls -l /bin/ping-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 44168 May  8  2014 /bin/ping

In the preceding permission set, we see that the owner and the group of the /bin/ping file are both root and root. The permission in the user field is rws, which basically denotes that the SUID bit is set on this particular binary file. This essentially means that whenever an ordinary user runs this binary file, the file will inherit the permission of the owner of the file and not of the user executing it.

In order to demonstrate this, let's run the ping command as an ordinary user:

zeal@kplabs:~$ ping kplabs.inPING kplabs.in (139.162.21.95) 56(84) bytes of data ...