On Sat, Sep 23, 2006 at 12:22:11PM -0700, Dan wrote:
> Looking through multiple sites and looking at all of the different
> strategies on locking a user into a particular set of directories.
> It would seem that using chroot is the only way to accomplish this.  

Exactly.

> In ProFTPd there is an option to set the default root to anything we
> want (including the user's home directory).  This is accomplished by
> some programming in ProFTPd itself as I never setup any chroot jails
> on my system.  

There is a world of difference: ftpd does not rely on other programs
to do its work; it does everything related to ftp by itself.  In fact,
under such circumstances, I think it could set up a real chroot
without having to go through the hastle of copying libraries and such.
I haven't looked at ProFTPd's code to see what it does, but if it
wants to pretend that you can't access some files outside a particular
directory, it's perfectly fine for it to do that, too.  Either way,
rssh doesn't have that luxury.

By contrast, rssh does only two things: create chroot jails, and
execute some other program.  If you use sftp, it executes sftp-server.
If you use scp, it executes scp.  You would need to modify THOSE
programs... not rssh.  What you are requesting is impossible.

Also FWIW blocking access programmatically is not the same thing as
setting up a chroot jail; if someone were to find a way to exploit the
program that does this to get a shell, they would still have access to
the whole system.  By contrast, as long as the calling program which
sets up a chroot jail does it correctly, and there's no bug in the OS,
this is impossible.  So using real chroot jails is arguably "safer"
than just faking it (though a bug is required in any case, so it's
also arguable that it makes no difference).

> I read on some website somewhere that SSH has the same capability of
> creating a default root without actually being a chroot jail (you
> don't need to do the copying or linking of extra files).  

I've never heard of this (not with OpenSSH), but if that's true, then
you're all set: configure SSH to do that.  :)

> Is there some way that RSSH can implement this sort of
> functionality?  

No.  But even if there were, I wouldn't do it anyway... I'm only
maintaining it for bugs (haven't been any found this year).  But
it doesn't matter for you, since what you want is impossible.

Sorry.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D

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