Rooting: Security risk?

[shadows090]

So I've seen quite a few threads on here at the pros and cons of rooting. I've yet to see anyone mention a risk of security at running a rooted phone, but maybe I don't understand it quite as well. It's pretty well known in the linux community that from a security standpoint it's safer to run your system on differnent levels of users (one of the reasons that the default user in distros such as fedora and ubuntu is a limited user). Is there any concern such as this with linux based phones?

I'm not really a linux guru, but I like to think that I generally know what I'm doing. And I'm pretty much new to phones, and have only used an android OS phone a few times.

On a side note, do they have tools like wireshark/nmap/ethercap with android phones (I would imagine that you'd have to root to do so)?

Thanks guys

EDIT: I guess it would make a bit more sense to know more about rooting on the phones first. Does rooting give you a constant super user ability? Or do you still have to "sudo bash" from the user account or something equivilent each time before you have the super user access? (like on most linux machines)

 

[momoceio]

When an application needs root access to run, I'm prompted to allow always, allow once, deny always or deny once. So, basically SUDO.

 

[shadows090]

That's cool. Idk why but I was under the impression that rooting set the normal user as a constant superuser, in which case there would be a potentially higher security risk.

I guess that was pretty easy to clear up.

Is it possible to run CUI tools such as nmap/ethercap? That would be friggin awesome when connected to wifi (if its possible)