Daemon security

Recently (between versions 1.2.0pre3 - 1.2.0pre7) there have been a number of buffer overflow type security problems with ProFTPD, with the coming release of pre7 these should be under control. Though no absolute statement can be given on the security of the software (this is true for every piece of software out there). A significant amount of effort has been put into removing the more 'dangerous' system calls which are prone to overflow attacks.

There is a known security problem with ALL unix FTP daemons, which requires the daemon to retain root privileges even after a client has fully authenticated. In ProFTPD versions 1.0.x, a decision was made to ignore RFC959's port 20 requirements in the interests of security. This approach has now been abandoned in favour of a more rfc compliant approach.

ProFTPD takes a middle road in terms of security. It only uses root privileges where required and drops to the UID defined in the config file at all other times. Times when root is required include, binding to ports < 1024, setting resource limits, reading configuration information and some network code.