Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
chroot useful?
From: Claudio Telmon <claudio () link it>
Date: Sat, 08 Nov 1997 20:38:10 +0100
I always had some doubts about the real protection that a chrooted environment can give. As you know, there is a lot of things that can be done in this environment, supposing you can bring some binaries in it: connect to other ports using the loopback interface, connect to internal hosts etc. These days I was talking about this with a list member, so I tried on a linux box to mount the /proc filesystem in a chrooted environment, and it worked. I had immediate access to all the process descriptors, filtering rules and all a hacker may dream to reach in a system. It seems to be actually obvious, since the proc filesystem is an interface to the kernel, and the kernel is still there even in chroot. My questions are: 1) Did I miss something so that my test is meaningless? 2) I used the chroot command, not the system call; could the problem be a consequence of a buggy implementation of the command? Maybe I should try using the system call in a C program... 3) Is the problem common on other systems with the proc file system? 4) I didn't try mknod, but it should work the same way, right? And finally: if the above is correct, what's the usefulness of chroot, besides giving some more trouble to the hacker? Thanks ciao - Claudio
Current thread:
- chroot useful? Claudio Telmon (Nov 08)
- Re: chroot useful? Darren Reed (Nov 09)
- Re: chroot useful? Claudio Telmon (Nov 09)
- Re: chroot useful? Joseph S. D. Yao (Nov 10)
- Re: chroot useful? Andreas Siegert (Nov 12)
- Re: chroot useful? chuck+fwwiz (Nov 10)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: chroot useful? Paul McNabb (Nov 12)
- Re: chroot useful? Steven M. Bellovin (Nov 13)
- Re: chroot useful? C Matthew Curtin (Nov 21)
- Re: chroot useful? Steven M. Bellovin (Nov 13)
- Re: chroot useful? Paul McNabb (Nov 12)
- Re: chroot useful? Douglas R. Steinbaum (Nov 13)
(Thread continues...)
- Re: chroot useful? Darren Reed (Nov 09)