smrsh - Man Page

smrsh -c command

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 /etc/smrsh, 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 ``', `<', `>', `;', `$', `(', `)', `\r' (carriage return), or `\n' (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/ucb/vacation”, “/usr/bin/vacation”, “/home/server/mydir/bin/vacation”, and “vacation” all actually forward to “/etc/smrsh/vacation”.

System administrators should be conservative about populating the /etc/smrsh 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 /etc/smrsh directory. Note that this does not restrict the use of shell or perl scripts in the sm.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).

/etc/smrsh - directory for restricted programs

sendmail(8)