suse man page for smrsh

Query: smrsh

OS: suse

Section: 8

Format: Original Unix Latex Style Formatted with HTML and a Horizontal Scroll Bar

SMRSH(8)						      System Manager's Manual							  SMRSH(8)

NAME
smrsh - restricted shell for sendmail
SYNOPSIS
smrsh -c command
DESCRIPTION
The smrsh program is intended as a replacement for sh for use in the ``prog'' mailer in sendmail(8) configuration files. It sharply limits the commands that can be run using the ``|program'' syntax of sendmail in order to improve the over all security of your system. Briefly, even if a ``bad guy'' can get sendmail to run a program without going through an alias or forward file, smrsh limits the set of programs that he or she can execute. Briefly, smrsh limits programs to be in a single directory, by default /usr/lib/sendmail.d/bin/ allowing the system administrator to choose the set of acceptable commands, and to the shell builtin commands ``exec'', ``exit'', and ``echo''. It also rejects any commands with the characters ``', `<', `>', `;', `$', `(', `)', ` ' (carriage return), or ` ' (newline) on the command line to prevent ``end run'' attacks. It allows ``||'' and ``&&'' to enable commands like: ``"|exec /usr/local/bin/filter || exit 75"'' Initial pathnames on programs are stripped, so forwarding to ``/usr/bin/vacation'', ``/usr/bin/vacation'', ``/home/server/mydir/bin/vaca- tion'', and ``vacation'' all actually forward to `/usr/lib/sendmail.d/bin/vacation''. System administrators should be conservative about populating the /usr/lib/sendmail.d/bin/ directory. For example, a reasonable additions is vacation(1), and the like. No matter how brow-beaten you may be, never include any shell or shell-like program (such as perl(1)) in the /usr/lib/sendmail.d/bin/ directory. Note that this does not restrict the use of shell or perl scripts in the /usr/lib/sendmail.d/bin/ directory (using the ``#!'' syntax); it simply disallows execution of arbitrary programs. Also, including mail filtering programs such as procmail(1) is a very bad idea. procmail(1) allows users to run arbitrary programs in their procmailrc(5).
COMPILATION
Compilation should be trivial on most systems. You may need to use -DSMRSH_PATH="path" to adjust the default search path (defaults to ``/bin:/usr/bin'') and/or -DSMRSH_CMDDIR="dir" to change the default program directory (defaults to ``/usr/lib/sendmail.d/bin/'').
FILES
/usr/lib/sendmail.d/bin/ - default directory for restricted programs on SuSE Linux
SEE ALSO
sendmail(8) $Date: 2004/08/06 03:55:35 $ SMRSH(8)
Related Man Pages
smrsh(1m) - sunos
sendmail(4) - opensolaris
forward(4) - osf1
mailstats(8) - osf1
vacation.sendmail(1) - debian
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