[gopher] Re: Security issues in Gopher?

[Tristan Alexander McLeay <anstouh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Put simply, it puts you into gaol. If you typed, say, 
$ chroot /home/anstouh
all you could do is access the programs below /home/anstouh. You can't write an
event to a logfile, you can't run 'ls' (unless 'ls' happens to be somewhere in
/home/anstouh, of course). 

If the only files in /var/gopher are owned by anstouh, read/writable by owner,
readable by group and world, and you run a chrooted gopher as user nobody,
there's not much someone can do if they manage to convince gopher to do
anything other than serve up files and directories.

<Insert standard disclaimer.>

Tristan.

 --- Robert Hahn <rhahn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
> > > pretty sound to me (ie: user 'nobody' can't really do a whole lot of 
> > > damage) so I'm wondering what it would take for me to run gopherd as 
> > > nobody - and better still, why people are running it as root.
> > 
> > You can not only run gopherd as nobody (see -u) but you can also run
> > it chroot, which is more than you get with Apache even.
> 
> Interesting.  I manned chroot last night, which gave me a clear answer as to
> what and how, but, as is typical with all man pages, lacks a 'why'. :P
> 
> So, can you explain what the significance of chroot* is and how it increases
> security?  Especially as it compares to running a server either as 'nobody'
> or (horrors) root?
> 
> * I don't know what your manpage says, but mine says that chroot simply
> changes the location of the root home folder.
> 
> Or... point me to a resource that would do as well?
> 
> thx,
> -rh
> 

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