Creating a jail aims at isolating a program from the rest of the file system. The central idea is to create a sandbox so that entities that the program does not need to access under normal operation are made inaccessible. This makes it much harder to abuse a potential flaw that could can otherwise lead to unconstrained system compromise, and consequently functions as a defense-in-depth strategy. A jail may consist of world viewable programs that require fewer resources to execute than those that exist on that system. Jails are only useful when there is no way to elevate privileges in the event of program failure.
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