Writing about the somewhat surprising history of chroot() did leave me with one question: when did chroot() start to confine processes inside the new root directory hierarchy? This is an interesting moment because it marks the point where chroot() stops being a little hack to help emulation and instead turns into a security feature.

(The first use of chroot() as a security feature seems to be in the 4.2BSD ftpd, as covered in the first entry. I can't be completely sure of this because I can't find an easily searchable version of the tuhs.org 4.1c BSD tree.)

Early versions of chroot() appear to be trivially escapable by things like 'cd /; cd ..', which puts you in the parent of the nominal root directory. A version of the chroot() system call that did not allow this appears in 4.1c BSD; you can see the code in namei(). Unlike the 4BSD version of the same code, this code specifically checks to see if you are trying to look up '..' at the chroot root directory, and remaps the result if you are.

I don't know for sure why this change appeared in 4.1c BSD, but it's possible to speculate. The 4BSD namei() is essentially the same as the V7 namei(), but the 4.1c BSD namei() is significantly changed in several ways (for example, it has a lot more comments). 4.1c BSD is the first appearance of two significant changes related to namei(); it's when BSD introduced both a rename() system call and the BSD FFS. It also seems to have seen a significant reorganization of the kernel source code away from its previous V7-like appearance. So I suspect that when the BSD people were changing namei() around anyways because of other changes, they noticed and fixed the chroot escape. With the chroot escape fixed, it was then used as a security feature in the 4.2BSD ftpd.

(The history portion of the Wikipedia page on chroot is no help, because it's clearly wrong unless you creatively reinterpret what it's saying. chroot() was not 'added' to BSD at any point, because BSD inherited it from V7 from the start. This bit of history appears to come from the references section of FreeBSD's Jails: Confining the omnipotent root (via) from 2000 and may refer either to the addition of a chroot(2) manpage or the namei() changes.)

Sidebar: The peculiar history of chroot() documentation

In V7, as I discovered, chroot() is documented in the chdir() manpage. However, while 32V, 3BSD, and 4BSD all still have the chroot() system call, documentation for it has disappeared from their chdir() manpages. A chroot() manpage (re)appears only in 4.1c BSD.

The 32V chdir() manpage seems to be the V7 manpage with the chroot() documentation removed (and it definitely isn't the V6 chdir() manpage). It may be that the chroot() stuff was removed because the 32V people thought it was a hack that was better off not being documented, or maybe 32V got their manpages from an earlier version of V7 that didn't have the chroot() addition.