You can use traceroute
for advanced network tracing , you can choose between IPv4 and Ipv6 protocols , you can also choose between ICMP, TCP or UDP data formats for a probe.
So traceroute
has more advanced options than tracepath
which uses UDP packets for tracing.
Now about superuser privileges :
you can use traceroute
with both a normal user and a superuser that depends on the option you want to use , here is an example :
Here we are using UDP packets which doesn't need superuser privileges
Here we are using ICMP echo packets which need privileges .
By ICMP packets you can make DDOS attack.
To learn about ICMP options Traceroute Man Page
To view traceroute
options type in terminal man traceroute
ICMP need super user privileges , to ensure just administrators can use some of its options , because it can be used to make ping of death and collecting information about a specific network , the privilege here will give the super user the ability to change options using ICMP packets.
That you can see it , when you try to ping so websites like www.microsoft.com
, your ping will fail even its online, and that because Microsoft routers block ICMP_requests .
So linux protect the system from unprivileged user , so they can not use this commands for attacking .