How to Setup Chroot SFTP in Linux (Allow Only SFTP, not SSH)

If you want to setup an account on your system that will be used only to transfer files (and not to ssh to the system), you should setup SFTP Chroot Jail as explained in this article.

In a typical sftp scenario (when chroot sftp is not setup), if you use sftp, you can see root’s file as shown below.

If you want to give sftp access on your system to outside vendors to transfer files, you should not use standard sftp. Instead, you should setup Chroot SFTP Jail as explained below.

Non-Chroot SFTP Environment

In the following example (a typical sftp environment), john can sftp to the system, and view /etc folder and download the files from there.

# sftp john@thegeekstuff.com
john@thegeekstuff's password:
sftp> pwd
Remote working directory: /home/john

sftp> ls
projects  john.txt documents 

sftp> cd /etc
sftp> ls -l passwd
-rw-r--r--    0 0        0            3750 Dec 29 23:09 passwd

sftp> get passwd
Fetching /etc/passwd to passwd
/etc/passwd     100% 3750     3.7KB/s   00:00

Chroot SFTP Environment

In the following example, john can sftp to the system, and view only the directory that you’ve designated for john to perform sftp (i.e /incoming).

When john tries to perform ‘cd /etc’, it will give an error message. Since SFTP is setup in an chroot environment, john cannot view any other files in the system.

# sftp john@thegeekstuff.com
john@thegeekstuff's password:
sftp> pwd
Remote working directory: /home/john

sftp> ls
sftp> cd /etc
Couldn't canonicalise: No such file or directory

Now that you know what Chroot SFTP environment is, let us see how to set this up.

1. Create a New Group

Create a group called sftpusers. Only users who belong to this group will be automatically restricted to the SFTP chroot environment on this system.

# groupadd sftpusers

2. Create Users (or Modify Existing User)

Let us say you want to create an user guestuser who should be allowed only to perform SFTP in a chroot environment, and should not be allowed to perform SSH.

The following command creates guestuser, assigns this user to sftpusers group, make /incoming as the home directory, set /sbin/nologin as shell (which will not allow the user to ssh and get shell access).

# useradd -g sftpusers -d /incoming -s /sbin/nologin guestuser
# passwd guestuser

Verify that the user got created properly.

# grep guestuser /etc/passwd
guestuser:x:500:500::/incoming:/sbin/nologin

If you want to modify an existing user and make him an sftp user only and put him in the chroot sftp jail, do the following:

# usermod -g sftpusers -d /incoming -s /sbin/nologin john

On a related note, if you have to transfer files from windows to Linux, use any one of the sftp client mentioned in this top 7 sftp client list.

3. Setup sftp-server Subsystem in sshd_config

You should instruct sshd to use the internal-sftp for sftp (instead of the default sftp-server).

Modify the the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and comment out the following line:

#Subsystem       sftp    /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server

Next, add the following line to the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file

Subsystem       sftp    internal-sftp

# grep sftp /etc/ssh/sshd_config
#Subsystem      sftp    /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server
Subsystem       sftp    internal-sftp

4. Specify Chroot Directory for a Group

You want to put only certain users (i.e users who belongs to sftpusers group) in the chroot jail environment. Add the following lines at the end of /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# tail /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Match Group sftpusers
        ChrootDirectory /sftp/%u
        ForceCommand internal-sftp

In the above:

• Match Group sftpusers – This indicates that the following lines will be matched only for users who belong to group sftpusers
• ChrootDirectory /sftp/%u – This is the path that will be used for chroot after the user is authenticated. %u indicates the user. So, for john, this will be /sftp/john.
• ForceCommand internal-sftp – This forces the execution of the internal-sftp and ignores any command that are mentioned in the ~/.ssh/rc file.

5. Create sftp Home Directory

Since we’ve specified /sftp as ChrootDirectory above, create this directory (which iw equivalent of your typical /home directory).

# mkdir /sftp

Now, under /sftp, create the individual directories for the users who are part of the sftpusers group. i.e the users who will be allowed only to perform sftp and will be in chroot environment.

# mkdir /sftp/guestuser

So, /sftp/guestuser is equivalent to / for the guestuser. When guestuser sftp to the system, and performs “cd /”, they’ll be seeing only the content of the directories under “/sftp/guestuser” (and not the real / of the system). This is the power of the chroot.

So, under this directory /sftp/guestuser, create any subdirectory that you like user to see. For example, create a incoming directory where users can sftp their files.

# mkdir /sftp/guestuser/incoming

6. Setup Appropriate Permission

For chroot to work properly, you need to make sure appropriate permissions are setup properly on the directory you just created above.

Set the owenership to the user, and group to the sftpusers group as shown below.

# chown guestuser:sftpusers /sftp/guestuser/incoming

The permission will look like the following for the incoming directory.

# ls -ld /sftp/guestuser/incoming
drwxr-xr-x 2 guestuser sftpusers 4096 Dec 28 23:49 /sftp/guestuser/incoming

The permission will look like the following for the /sftp/guestuser directory

# ls -ld /sftp/guestuser
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 28 23:49 /sftp/guestuser

# ls -ld /sftp
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 28 23:49 /sftp

7. Restart sshd and Test Chroot SFTP

Restart sshd:

# service sshd restart

Test chroot sftp environment. As you see below, when gusetuser does sftp, and does “cd /”, they’ll only see incoming directory.

# sftp guestuser@thegeekstuff.com
guestuser@thegeekstuff's password:

sftp> pwd
Remote working directory: /incoming

sftp> cd /
sftp> ls
incoming

When guestuser transfers any files to the /incoming directory from the sftp, they’ll be really located under /sftp/guestuser/incoming directory on the system.

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