[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: anyone tried chroot_safe?



Greg Norris wrote:
> Has anyone here has tried out chroot_safe[1]?  Any comments on how well
> it works, or how it compares security-wise to a normal chroot
> environment?  I have a couple of small apps (such as the Folding@Home
> client) which I'd like to run chroot'd, and this beastie sounds like an
> ideal way to go about it.
> 
> For those of you aren't familiar, chroot_safe claims to chroot
> dynamically linked applications without requiring all the libraries (and
> other supporting files) to be present.  Apparently this is done by
> pre-linking (via a LD_PRELOAD stub), and then chrooting before the app
> is actually started.

I haven't read any of the code, but based on their documentation, so
long as you trust the binary you're chrooting, it should be as safe as
regular chroot. The paranoid part of me suspects that a malicious binary
could run under chroot_safe and manage to avoid running chrooted,
although it might have to find an exploit a hole in chroot_safe to do
so. But as long as you trust the binary program you're chrooting, and
are only concerned about its behavior when fed untrusted data or the
like, after being chrooted, this seems like a perfectly safe and rather
handy way to go about chrooting it.

Oh and also, there's no reason a simple program without LD_PRELOAD magic
couldn't automatically set up a chroot environment for a program to run
in.

-- 
see shy jo

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature


Reply to: