How to Send Ping Requests Without Root Privileges Using UDP Sockets in Rust
By
bouk
Crusty in the right places. Worth the chew.
Summary
The article explains how to send ping requests without root privileges by using a UDP socket with ICMP protocol instead of creating a raw socket. The author notes that while standard ICMP sockets require root access, the ping command-line tool works without it, and reveals the technique of using UDP sockets with protocol flags. Due to a lack of simple examples online and poor performance from LLMs on this topic, the author created and shared a Rust implementation on GitHub.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledSending a ping by creating an ICMP socket normally requires root: you can't create a raw socket to send ICMP packets without it.
The ping command line tool works without root however, how is that possible? It turns out you can create a UDP socket with a protocol flag, which allows you to send the ping rootless.
I couldn't find any simple examples of this online and LLMs are surprisingly bad at this (probably because of the lack of examples).
Therefore I posted an example on GitHub in Rust.
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