Minimal scp only chroot in FreeBSD

Background

The other day I needed to receive a few files from a friend. And I wanted to provide an easy to use service to do so. Back in the days I did run a FTP service with anonymous login and write acces to a inbox folder (1777).  But these days I have a few more security concerns and wanted to provide a scp drop site, and exactly that. A “scp only chroot”.

Configuration

Giving chrooted ssh access is pretty straight forward in the sshd_config. But to actually get it to work you will have to fiddle around a bit. You will need to figure out exactly what files you will need inside the chroot for the service to function properly.

Create user

Just use your favourite way of creating users in your system.

sshd

The easy part is to configure your sshd_config to chroot the specific user, group or whatever you want to chroot. Since this is probably a one off for me I settled for a single user.

Match User scponly
  ChrootDirectory /home/%u
  X11Forwarding no
  AllowTcpForwarding no

This short configuration will chroot the user scponly to /home/scponly when it connects. You just need to restart sshd in order to these settings to take effect.

Setting up environment

The hardest part was to set up the environment since you will need to make all libs and so on available inside the chroot.

Since this was to be a one off solution I will not go through the hassle of loop/null mounts or stuff like that. I will simply copy the stuff thats actually needed into the chroot. To find out what libs you actually need you can use the tool ldd(1)

# ldd /usr/local/bin/scp 
/usr/local/bin/scp:
	libcrypto.so.8 => /lib/libcrypto.so.8 (0x800a00000)
	libz.so.6 => /lib/libz.so.6 (0x800e69000)
	libutil.so.9 => /lib/libutil.so.9 (0x801082000)
	libldns.so.2 => /usr/local/lib/libldns.so.2 (0x801296000)
	libcrypt.so.5 => /lib/libcrypt.so.5 (0x8014f3000)
	libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0x801712000)

So I just created a few directories in /home/scponly

# cd /home/scponly
# mkdir etc bin lib dev libexec

and then copied these libs to /home/scponly/lib/.

You will also need to have a shell that then can invoke scp. I copied /rescue/sh to /home/scponly/bin/ because it is statically linked and does not depend on any libraries. When all this was done I thought the whole thing was finished but I encountered a few problems.

Problems

The first one was scp complaining about missing ld-elf.so.1. So just like the other libs I just copied it in to /home/sftponly/libexec/.

Secondly scp started to complain about missing /dev/null. And my solution to this was to just create a empty file called null in /home/sftponly/dev/ and chmod to 666. Why it works with a regular file I dont know. If you have any idea please tell me in the comments.

The final problem I faced was an error when invoking scp that said “unknown user 1005”. I did some searches on the web and found several solutions that where Linux specific so no help there. But they involved putting a few more files and libs relevant to nss into the chroot.

What I finally found out was that its the /etc/master.passwd (think of shadow in linux) and its database that where missing. So I just did grep scponly /etc/master.passwd > /home/scponly/etc/master.passwd to copy only the record for scponly to the chroot.

sad:*:1005:1002::0:0:scp only user:/home/scponly:/bin/sh

Finally the actual databased needed to be created with this command

# pwd_mkdb -d /home/scponly/etc/ /home/scponly/etc/master.passwd

Thats it! Now I have a account thats basically all it can do is scp. Yes you can login and get a shell but since there is no other binaries than scp and sh you are pretty limited.