Chroot jail

A chroot jail is a sandbox environment on a UNIX system, created using the chroot command.

Creating sandboxes for software to run in is an old idea. There are many malicious crackers and worms on the modern day Internet. If a malicious program or intruder is able to gain access to a system and attain root (superuser) privileges, total control over the system is achieved.

To gain access to a system, an intruder will attempt to Apache (an http server for use on the World Wide Web) in a chroot jail

• run BIND (a DNS name server) in a chroot jail
• an large set of utilities to build, secure and run your jailed users/daemons/etc.