General Information

Chrooting has been around for a long time now.  Chrooting makes a program believe that the root of the file system is higher up in the hierarchy.  For example, if I wanted to create a chroot in /chroot/httpd, a program executed from within the chroot would believe that "/chroot/httpd" was actually "/".  There in lies the beauty as the program can't reach any files outside "/chroot/httpd".  Security of the server as a whole is increased due to the fact that the system binaries are off limits.  In addition, chroots usually only have the bare minimum files inside, so exploits have a harder time breaking in.

Chroots can be broken out of.  On FreeBSD, jail can also be used.  Jail does the same as chroot, but on top of what chroot does, jail restricts what a process can do.  One of the benefits of OpenBSD is the fact that apache comes chrooted by default, which is nice.  But, that's not going to stop NetBSD or FreeBSD from doing this also.

So, why chroot instead of jail?  Jailing processes is actually a simple task.  Basically I want to help you out with 2 areas in this article.  The first is to get apache and php chrooted while working with a chrooted mysql.  And the second, I hope you can figure out from this how to chroot your own processes.  Once you figure out how to setup chroot trees, configuring jails should not be a challenge for you at all.

Installation

Lets start off by installing apache with mod_ssl and create our SSL certificates.

# # # #

cd /usr/ports/www/apache13-modssl make make certificate TYPE=custom make install

Next we set a variable of where we wish to place it.  To help avoid unnecessary typing, it's recommended that you have your chroot directory on its own disklabel.  This way you can place further restrictions in the /etc/fstab file.

#	TGT=/chroot/httpd

Configuration

Now we need to prepare our directory structure for the chroot.

# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

cd $TGT mkdir dev mkdir etc mkdir tmp mkdir -p var/run mkdir -p usr/lib mkdir usr/libexec mkdir -p usr/local/www/ mkdir usr/local/lib mkdir -p usr/local/etc/apache mkdir -p usr/local/libexec/apache mkdir -p usr/local/www/data mkdir usr/local/www/vhosts mkdir usr/local/sbin mkdir -p usr/X11R6/lib mkdir var/log

Next, there are a few devices we need in our dev directory in which apache needs.  We will use the mknod for this task.

# # # # # # # # #

mknod $TGT/dev/null c 2 2 chown root:sys $TGT/dev/null chmod 666 $TGT/dev/null mknod $TGT/dev/random c 2 3 chown root:wheel $TGT/dev/random chmod 755 $TGT/dev/random cd $TGT/dev ln -s random urandom vi /etc/rc.conf

Add the following line in so we can get some logging going on.

syslogd_flags="-l /chroot/httpd/dev/log" # Or Where your target resides

Now there are a few methods we can use to figure out what files we need for our chroot: ldd, truss, and strings are amongst the most commonly used.  I'll go over ldd and strings here.

# ldd /usr/local/sbin/httpd /usr/local/sbin/httpd: libcrypt.so.2 => /usr/lib/libcrypt.so.2 (0x280c6000) libmm.so.13 => /usr/local/lib/libmm.so.13 (0x280df000) libc.so.5 => /usr/lib/libc.so.5 (0x280e3000) # strings /usr/local/sbin/httpd | grep lib /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1 libcrypt.so.2 libmm.so.13 libc.so.5

Those commands will display the required libraries.  Next, we need to copy those required libraries over to our chroot.

# # # # # # # # # # #

install -C /usr/local/sbin/httpd $TGT/usr/local/sbin install -C /var/run/ld-elf.so.hints $TGT/var/run/ install -C /usr/lib/libcrypt.so.2 $TGT/usr/lib/ install -C /usr/lib/libc.so.5 $TGT/usr/lib/ install -C /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1 $TGT/usr/libexec/ install -C /usr/local/lib/libexpat.so.4 $TGT/usr/local/lib/ install -C /usr/local/lib/libmm.so.13 $TGT/usr/local/lib/ cp /etc/hosts $TGT/etc/ cp /etc/resolv.conf $TGT/etc/ cp /etc/group $TGT/etc/ cp /etc/master.passwd $TGT/etc/passwords

Remove everything inside the group and passwords file except for the user/group www and nobody/nogroup

# # # # # #

vi $TGT/etc/group vi $TGT/etc/passwords cd $TGT/etc pwd_mkdb -p -d $TGT/etc passwords rm -f $TGT/etc/master.passwd cp -Rvp /usr/local/etc/apache/* $TGT/usr/local/etc/apache/

Now, before we get into too much else, go ahead and install php and any other apache modules, which you require or need.

Once that's done let's get those modules inside the chroot tree.

#	cp -Rvp /usr/local/libexec/apache/* $TGT/usr/local/libexec/apache/

Now php can be a pain depending upon what options you gave it to install.  So we're going to determine what libraries php needs just like we did with apache.

# ldd /usr/local/libexec/apache/libphp4.so /usr/local/libexec/apache/libphp4.so: libcrypto.so.3 => /usr/local/lib/libcrypto.so.3 (0x2833d000) libssl.so.3 => /usr/local/lib/libssl.so.3 (0x28441000) libcrypt.so.2 => /usr/lib/libcrypt.so.2 (0x28472000) libc-client4.so.8 => /usr/local/lib/libc-client4.so.8 (0x2848b000) libzzip.so.10 => /usr/local/lib/libzzip.so.10 (0x28542000)

Those are just a few.  I'm sure your list is much longer.  So we need to ensure these libraries are inside our chroot tree.

# # # # #

install -C /usr/local/lib/libcrypto.so.3 $TGT/usr/local/lib/ install -C /usr/local/lib/libssl.so.3 $TGT/usr/local/lib/ install -C /usr/lib/libcrypt.so.2 $TGT/usr/lib/ install -C /usr/local/lib/libc-client4.so.8 $TGT/usr/local/lib/ install -C /usr/local/lib/libzzip.so.10 $TGT/usr/local/lib/

And so on...Or, if you wish to take the lazy-man's approach, you could run this:

# # # # # #

ldd /usr/local/libexec/apache/libphp4.so | awk {' print $3 '} | \ grep '/usr/lib' | xargs -J % install -C % $TGT/usr/lib/ ldd /usr/local/libexec/apache/libphp4.so | awk {' print $3 '} | \ grep '/usr/local/lib' | xargs -J % install -C % $TGT/usr/local/lib/ ldd /usr/local/libexec/apache/libphp4.so | awk {' print $3 '} | \ grep '/usr/X11R6' | xargs -J % install -C % $TGT/usr/X11R6/lib/

Now, just to show you how great of a tool xargs is, let's use it to run the same thing on all the apache modules.  (I would like to thank http://daemonnews.org for teaching me that this wonderful command existed.)

# # # # # #

ldd /usr/local/libexec/apache/* | grep '=>' | awk {' print $3 '} | \ grep '/usr/lib' | xargs -J % install -C % $TGT/usr/lib/ ldd /usr/local/libexec/apache/* | grep '=>' | awk {' print $3 '} | \ grep '/usr/local/lib' | xargs -J % install -C % $TGT/usr/local/lib/ ldd /usr/local/libexec/apache/* | grep '=>' | awk {' print $3 '} | \ grep '/usr/X11R6/lib' | xargs -J % install -C % $TGT/usr/X11R6/lib/

Now let's try to fire it up.

#	chroot $TGT /usr/local/sbin/httpd

Well, that seems to have worked.  Now we need to integrate mysql into this.  This is really simple.

# #	cp /etc/my.cnf $TGT/etc/ ln /chroot/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock $TGT/tmp/mysql.sock

It should be working now.  Just edit your configurations to your desire and enjoy.  Don't forget to edit your startup scripts for apache.

Author: Leigh Renfrow
soup4you2 at mac dot com