Chrooted SSH HowTo

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
Last edited: 01/18/2006

This tutorial describes how to install and configure OpenSSH so that it will allow chrooted sessions for users. With this setup, you can give your users shell access without having to fear that they can see your whole system. Your users will be jailed in a specific directory which they will not be able to break out of.

This setup is based on a Debian Sarge (Debian 3.1) system, and the chrooted SSH will be installed in such a way that it will still use the configuration files of the standard OpenSSH Debian package which are in /etc/ssh/, and you will be able to use the standard OpenSSH Debian init script /etc/init.d/ssh. Therefore you do not have to create your own init script and configuration file.

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Install The Newest Zlib Version

Because there was a security hole in zlib-1.2.2 about which the chrooted SSH will complain when we try to compile it, we install the newest zlib version right now:

cd /tmp
wget http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
tar xvfz zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
cd zlib-1.2.3
make clean
./configure -s
make
make install

2 Install The Chrooted SSH

This is quite easy. We download the patched OpenSSH sources, and we configure them with /usr as directory for the SSH executable files, with /etc/ssh as directory where the chrooted SSH will look for configuration files, and we also allow PAM authentication:

cd /tmp
apt-get install libpam0g-dev openssl libcrypto++-dev libssl0.9.7 libssl-dev ssh
wget http://chrootssh.sourceforge.net/download/openssh-4.2p1-chroot.tar.gz
tar xvfz openssh-4.2p1-chroot.tar.gz
cd openssh-4.2p1-chroot
./configure --exec-prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc/ssh --with-pam
make
make install