Asked by: Naoual Ouarti
technology and computing operating systems

What is the purpose of chroot?

22
Change root directory to the supplied directory newroot and executes command, if supplied, or an interactive copy of the user's shell


Keeping this in consideration, why we use chroot in Linux?

chroot command in Linux/Unix system is used to change the root directory. Every process/command in Linux/Unix like systems has a current working directory called root directory.

“chroot” command can be very useful:

  • To create a test environment.
  • To recover the system or password.
  • To reinstall the bootloader.

Similarly, is chroot safe? chroot and non-root users When you take the whole system into consideration, you do not gain any real security from your chroot(). Putting a regular user in a chroot() will prevent them from having access to the rest of the system. This means using a chroot is not less secure, but it is not more secure either.

Also, how do you use chroot jail?

Using chroot utility

  1. To use a chroot jail, use the following command (new_root must be an existing directory):
  2. The new_root directory becomes the artificial root directory.
  3. For example, assuming SHELL is set to /bin/bash, and the /home/user/jail directory exists, running the chroot command results in the following:

How do I exit chroot?

We can exit from chrooted environment by pressing Ctrl-D. chroot can be used to build chroot jail to protect server services for preventing attacker to gain complete access to the server by creating chroot jails.

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