@iago:
What I take away from that isn't so much about specific programs that can or will potentially be exploited but as always falls back to admins,users and their actions in an environment..
Which can result in malicious code execution leading to the whole environment being compromised.
For me personally I'm not one to live in fear of such things happening and not do or provide what I normally would in "ideal" situations, both in real life and in things like this.
So that brings me more or less back to the original question of what would most people consider fairly safe must have tools, that you would want to have access to ideally for web/personal use.
Also raises a second question based off the assumption that at some point the chroot environment can possibly fail.. and how to best protect you're network and the outside world from the consiquences of such a failure.
My general experience would say:
1) Descent router/firewall setup that seperates the "Public" servers that are potentially vulnerable, from the rest of you're network.
2) Active anti virus, rootkit, other scanning.
3) Active Security Auditing.
4) Staying aware and upto date with security information in general.
5) Backups, and more Backups.. did I mention backups?
Would provide a fairly descent margin for error/failure on the public frontend servers, that could be restored, updated and fixed if something did go bad.
Anyway this is very helpfull to me im fairly new to bsd/*nix, less then a year but im not one to do things without doing research so i've learned alot and still learning..
Things like this help me make sure im clear and approaching things correctly..
As always thanks for the input it's always appreciated..
Any idea's/suggestions/critique to further things is always welcome.
@nslay:
That is correct no su or sudo access i'm trying to provide direct chrooted access to only specific tools in a webserver environment.
Thru a control panel (ispconfig) I create users, and can assign them ftp/email/ssh/other access etc. all chrooted.
So personally i'm looking to find out what may be considered safe to provide for users, that may aid in editing html or setting up php scripts/software, which is why I was asking about nano/vim etc.
But also the general discussion about chroot in general and using apps and the security ramifications are also very welcome it's good to know and read for me, and im sure others also.