At some point you might find yourself in a situation where you need to grant sftp access to a user but it should be configured to prevent them from traversing the entire directory structure within the system. This is where the built-in chroot functionality within sshd comes in handy. It will enable you to restrict and isolate the user to a specific directory and easily prevent unauthorized access. In this example, we will cover the configuration steps for setting up access for one user named jsmith within the Accounting department.

1. Create the User

As the root user, create the account & password for jsmith. We will specify the home directory as /var/accounting. This will be the chrooted directory we are going to setup. The shell should be /bin/false to prevent any interactive shell logins.

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