ftp

Howto: Allowing SFTP access while chrooting the user and denying shell access.

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Usually SFTP will allow a system user to access their home directory to upload and download files with their account. The SFTP user can navigate anywhere in the server some times can download files it will produce security vulnerability.

The Chroot for SFTP will be denied to access the rest of the system as they will be chrooted to the user home directory. Thus users will not be able to snoop around the system to /etc or application directories. User login to a shell account will also be denied.

I the below procedures will allowed me to enable SFTP security,

1, Add a new group

2, Create a Chroot dir for launch the logins, which should owned by root

3, Modify sftp-internal for forcing chroot dir

4, reload the configuration

Steps :

Create Chroot launch directory with other have no previlege

mkdir /opt/chroot
chown root:root /opt/chroot
chmod 700 /opt/chroot

Create a common group for the chrooted users , SSH rule will work for the group

groupadd sftpgroup
useradd -g sftpgroup -s /sbin/nologin  -d /opt/chroot/planetuser planetuser
passwd planetuser

Modify ssh configuration

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Comment the general sftp subsubsystem and add new rule

#Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

#Add the line 
Subsystem sftp internal-sftp

# Rules for sftp group
Match group sftpgroup
ChrootDirectory %h
X11Forwarding no
AllowTcpForwarding no
ForceCommand internal-sftp

Then restart SSH service

service sshd restart

Error: 500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()

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Each time while am installing VSFTPD on ubuntu and enable chroot for the users it will refuse to login to the home directory because of write permission in its parent dir, to fix this I used the command

chmod a-w  /path/to/the/ftp/home

but is was most annoying and frustrating problem. I supposed to update the vsftpd package with security fix. the steps are below.

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/v/vsftpd/vsftpd_3.0.2-3_amd64.deb
dpkg -i vsftpd_3.0.2-3_amd64.deb
echo "allow_writeable_chroot=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd.conf
echo "seccomp_sandbox=NO" >> /etc/vsftpd.conf
service vsftpd reload

now the FTP service will work calm in my server.