James, I have taken the liberty of quoting this post on WikiLearn, at:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/preview/Wikilearn/ChrootJail Please see: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Wikilearn/QuotedEmailsLetter regards, Randy Kramer James wrote: > In the past script kiddies have used some of the original capabilities > of ftp to login, and take over computers. ie ftp up a program > (root-kit, etc) then login to the ftp directory compile it and run it. > When you chroot the program root gets set to the directory the user is > in. As far as they are concerned there exists nothing higher on the > directory tree than where they are This means that if they do manage to > exploit something the damage they can do is limited to the "jail" that > they are in. Other advantages include, but not limited to, > > 1. They can only use utilities that exist in that chroot jail ie ls ps > etc are local and any changes made to them aren't going to affect the > box as a whole. 2. Nib Nosers can't poke around your box and find your > secret stash of Britney Spears photo's 3. breaking out of the jail is > one more line of defense. > > These are but a few reasons why programs get chrooted. Chroot is also > useful if you have rebooted without running lilo first. It allows you > to boot from a rescue disk, mount the HDD and run lilo as if your root > was the mount point instead of the real /
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