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authorKevin Steves <stevesk@pobox.com>2002-05-13 03:57:04 +0000
committerKevin Steves <stevesk@pobox.com>2002-05-13 03:57:04 +0000
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1Privilege separation, or privsep, is an experimental feature in
2OpenSSH in which operations that require root privilege are performed
3by a separate privileged monitor process. Its purpose is to prevent
4privilege escalation by containing corruption to an unprivileged
5process. More information is available at:
6 http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/ssh/privsep.html
7
8Privilege separation is not enabled by default, and may be enabled by
9specifying "UsePrivilegeSeparation yes" in sshd_config; see the
10UsePrivilegeSeparation option in sshd(8).
11
12When privsep is enabled, the pre-authentication sshd process will
13chroot(2) to "/var/empty" and change its privileges to the "sshd" user
14and its primary group. You should do something like the following to
15prepare the privsep preauth environment:
16
17 # mkdir /var/empty
18 # chown root:sys /var/empty
19 # chmod 755 /var/empty
20 # groupadd sshd
21 # useradd -g sshd sshd
22
23/var/empty should not contain any files.
24
25configure supports the following options to change the default
26privsep user and chroot directory:
27
28 --with-privsep-path=xxx Path for privilege seperation chroot
29 --with-privsep-user=user Specify non-privileged user for privilege separation
30
31Privsep requires operating system support for file descriptor passing
32and mmap(MAP_ANON).
33
34PAM currently only works with privsep on Linux. It does not function
35on Solaris or HP-UX. PAMAuthenticationViaKbdInt does not function with
36privsep.
37
38Note that for a normal interactive login with a shell, enabling privsep
39will require 1 additional process per login session.
40
41Given the following process listing (from HP-UX):
42
43 UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME COMMAND
44 root 1005 1 0 10:45:17 ? 0:08 /opt/openssh/sbin/sshd -u0
45 root 6917 1005 0 15:19:16 ? 0:00 sshd: stevesk [priv]
46 stevesk 6919 6917 0 15:19:17 ? 0:03 sshd: stevesk@2
47 stevesk 6921 6919 0 15:19:17 pts/2 0:00 -bash
48
49process 1005 is the sshd process listening for new connections.
50process 6917 is the privileged monitor process, 6919 is the user owned
51sshd process and 6921 is the shell process.
52
53$Id: README.privsep,v 1.1 2002/05/13 03:57:04 stevesk Exp $