Re: Multicast netlink for non-root process

[Jean Tourrilhes]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 11:02:22PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> 
> There used to be a reason for it (ask Alexey for details), but it has gone.
> It should be safe now to remove it I think.
> 
> -Andi

	Ok, so let's ask Alexey ;-)

	One potential reason is that some of the message may contain
data that is root only. But this should be handled with a finer
granularity.
	One example : in the Wireless Extensions, when the user set
the WEP key, a RTNetlink message is generated indicating a change of
stateon the interface. This netlink message doesn't contain the WEP
key itself, the app has to request the key explicitely (and at that
point we catch the fact that the app is root or not).
	If you really want to be clever, you could add a bit to the
netlink message to specify root only delivery (by the way of
netlink_broadcast()). In all cases, the data producer is the one that
knows what data is sensitive or not.
	But, as currently it doesn't seem that any netlink message
that contain sensitive data (my WEP stuff beeing the exception and
taken care of), we could just lift this restriction.

	Regards,

	Jean