Creating secure environments with chroot

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Private Prison

Paul C. Brown

Virtualization is fine and all, but sometimes it can be overkill if all you want to do is run a program that you think could pose a threat to your system. chroot jails offer a light, fast, and well-tested alternative.

Some of the riskiest things you can do to your system are run software pulled off the Internet from an unfamiliar site or run applications that have not been tested and that might contain fatal bugs. In either case, it is never advisable to risk your data and hardware by running dubious apps directly on the system you use for your daily work and play.

However, you don't have to give up trying out new software. It could even be a job requirement if you work in IT developing potentially dangerous code – and, let's face it, all experimental code is potentially dangerous. In Linux, you can create a closed and controlled environment to do these things, and that's what chroot is all about.

Personal Space

Using chroot is in some ways similar to virtualizing a system but is much more limited in scope. Instead of recreating an entire computer system, chroot allows you to create a guest shell and an (initially) empty filesystem on a directory of your choice within your own directory tree.

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