rssh homepage

Introduction

rssh is a restricted shell for use with OpenSSH, allowing only scp and/or sftp. It now also includes support for rdist, rsync, and cvs. For example, if you have a server which you only want to allow users to copy files off of via scp, without providing shell access, you can use rssh to do that. For a list of platforms on which rssh is known to work, see the Platform Support Page.

Before installing rssh, please read the FAQ! See link at left.

Important Security Notice:

There are some potentially serious security implications involved with running rssh. Please be sure to read about them in the security section.

A note about versions: The v2.3.0 release is the only release anyone should be running at this point, regardless of what version you were running before and why you were running that version. If you're not running v2.3.0, please download it now.

News and updates

Jan 6, 2006

rssh v2.3.2 released today!

Important Security Notice:

Max Vozeler has reported a problem whereby rssh can allow users who have shell access to systems where rssh is installed (and rssh_chroot_helper is installed SUID) to gain root access to the system, due to the ability to chroot to arbitrary locations. There are a lot of potentially mitigating factors, but to be safe you should upgrade immediately. This bug affects all versions of rssh from v2.0.0 to v2.2.3, so please upgrade now!

The 2.3.0 release of rssh fixes this problem, by forcing the chroot helper to re-parse the config file to decide where to chroot(2) to. Users with shell access to the system can not subvert the chroot location, and may not be able to chroot at all depending on the configuration of rssh, which solves the problem. Unfortunately, that release contained a number of other bugs. Missing brackets in one function prevented the use of rsync and rdist, and there was a segfault caused in strlen() because I forgot to remove some unused variables. The 2.3.2 release fixes all those problems.

New in this version:

• root compromise bug fix
• fix for va_start/va_end bug that crashes on ia64
• fix for strlen() segfault
• fix for service checking bug that always allows cvs and always denies rdist and rsync...
• other small code clean-up fixes
• many documentation updates and improvements.

Note also that the RPM packages are now signed with my GPG key! You may want/need to download and import my key into rpm, using the following command: