PAM.CONF(5) - phpMan

PAM.CONF(5) Linux-PAM Manual PAM.CONF(5)

NAME
pam.conf, pam.d - PAM configuration files

DESCRIPTION
When a PAM aware privilege granting application is started, it activates its attachment to
the PAM-API. This activation performs a number of tasks, the most important being the
reading of the configuration file(s): /etc/pam.conf. Alternatively, this may be the
contents of the /etc/pam.d/ directory. The presence of this directory will cause Linux-PAM
to ignore /etc/pam.conf.

These files list the PAMs that will do the authentication tasks required by this service,
and the appropriate behavior of the PAM-API in the event that individual PAMs fail.

The syntax of the /etc/pam.conf configuration file is as follows. The file is made up of a
list of rules, each rule is typically placed on a single line, but may be extended with an
escaped end of line: `\<LF>'. Comments are preceded with `#' marks and extend to the next
end of line.

The format of each rule is a space separated collection of tokens, the first three being
case-insensitive:

service type control module-path module-arguments

The syntax of files contained in the /etc/pam.d/ directory, are identical except for the
absence of any service field. In this case, the service is the name of the file in the
/etc/pam.d/ directory. This filename must be in lower case.

An important feature of PAM, is that a number of rules may be stacked to combine the
services of a number of PAMs for a given authentication task.

The service is typically the familiar name of the corresponding application: login and su
are good examples. The service-name, other, is reserved for giving default rules. Only
lines that mention the current service (or in the absence of such, the other entries) will
be associated with the given service-application.

The type is the management group that the rule corresponds to. It is used to specify which
of the management groups the subsequent module is to be associated with. Valid entries
are:

account
this module type performs non-authentication based account management. It is typically
used to restrict/permit access to a service based on the time of day, currently
available system resources (maximum number of users) or perhaps the location of the
applicant user -- 'root' login only on the console.

auth
this module type provides two aspects of authenticating the user. Firstly, it
establishes that the user is who they claim to be, by instructing the application to
prompt the user for a password or other means of identification. Secondly, the module
can grant group membership or other privileges through its credential granting
properties.

password
this module type is required for updating the authentication token associated with the
user. Typically, there is one module for each 'challenge/response' based
authentication (auth) type.

session
this module type is associated with doing things that need to be done for the user
before/after they can be given service. Such things include the logging of information
concerning the opening/closing of some data exchange with a user, mounting
directories, etc.

If the type value from the list above is prepended with a - character the PAM library will
not log to the system log if it is not possible to load the module because it is missing
in the system. This can be useful especially for modules which are not always installed on
the system and are not required for correct authentication and authorization of the login
session.

The third field, control, indicates the behavior of the PAM-API should the module fail to
succeed in its authentication task. There are two types of syntax for this control field:
the simple one has a single simple keyword; the more complicated one involves a
square-bracketed selection of value=action pairs.

For the simple (historical) syntax valid control values are:

required
failure of such a PAM will ultimately lead to the PAM-API returning failure but only
after the remaining stacked modules (for this service and type) have been invoked.

requisite
like required, however, in the case that such a module returns a failure, control is
directly returned to the application or to the superior PAM stack. The return value is
that associated with the first required or requisite module to fail. Note, this flag
can be used to protect against the possibility of a user getting the opportunity to
enter a password over an unsafe medium. It is conceivable that such behavior might
inform an attacker of valid accounts on a system. This possibility should be weighed
against the not insignificant concerns of exposing a sensitive password in a hostile
environment.

sufficient
if such a module succeeds and no prior required module has failed the PAM framework
returns success to the application or to the superior PAM stack immediately without
calling any further modules in the stack. A failure of a sufficient module is ignored
and processing of the PAM module stack continues unaffected.

optional
the success or failure of this module is only important if it is the only module in
the stack associated with this service+type.

include
include all lines of given type from the configuration file specified as an argument
to this control.

substack
include all lines of given type from the configuration file specified as an argument
to this control. This differs from include in that evaluation of the done and die
actions in a substack does not cause skipping the rest of the complete module stack,
but only of the substack. Jumps in a substack also can not make evaluation jump out of
it, and the whole substack is counted as one module when the jump is done in a parent
stack. The reset action will reset the state of a module stack to the state it was in
as of beginning of the substack evaluation.

For the more complicated syntax valid control values have the following form:

[value1=action1 value2=action2 ...]

Where valueN corresponds to the return code from the function invoked in the module for
which the line is defined. It is selected from one of these: success, open_err,
symbol_err, service_err, system_err, buf_err, perm_denied, auth_err, cred_insufficient,
authinfo_unavail, user_unknown, maxtries, new_authtok_reqd, acct_expired, session_err,
cred_unavail, cred_expired, cred_err, no_module_data, conv_err, authtok_err,
authtok_recover_err, authtok_lock_busy, authtok_disable_aging, try_again, ignore, abort,
authtok_expired, module_unknown, bad_item, conv_again, incomplete, and default.

The last of these, default, implies 'all valueN's not mentioned explicitly. Note, the full
list of PAM errors is available in /usr/include/security/_pam_types.h. The actionN can
take one of the following forms:

ignore
when used with a stack of modules, the module's return status will not contribute to
the return code the application obtains.

bad
this action indicates that the return code should be thought of as indicative of the
module failing. If this module is the first in the stack to fail, its status value
will be used for that of the whole stack.

die
equivalent to bad with the side effect of terminating the module stack and PAM
immediately returning to the application.

ok
this tells PAM that the administrator thinks this return code should contribute
directly to the return code of the full stack of modules. In other words, if the
former state of the stack would lead to a return of PAM_SUCCESS, the module's return
code will override this value. Note, if the former state of the stack holds some value
that is indicative of a modules failure, this 'ok' value will not be used to override
that value.

done
equivalent to ok with the side effect of terminating the module stack and PAM
immediately returning to the application.

N (an unsigned integer)
equivalent to ok with the side effect of jumping over the next N modules in the stack.
Note that N equal to 0 is not allowed (and it would be identical to ok in such case).

reset
clear all memory of the state of the module stack and start again with the next
stacked module.

Each of the four keywords: required; requisite; sufficient; and optional, have an
equivalent expression in terms of the [...] syntax. They are as follows:

required
[success=ok new_authtok_reqd=ok ignore=ignore default=bad]

requisite
[success=ok new_authtok_reqd=ok ignore=ignore default=die]

sufficient
[success=done new_authtok_reqd=done default=ignore]

optional
[success=ok new_authtok_reqd=ok default=ignore]

module-path is either the full filename of the PAM to be used by the application (it
begins with a '/'), or a relative pathname from the default module location:
/lib/security/ or /lib64/security/, depending on the architecture.

module-arguments are a space separated list of tokens that can be used to modify the
specific behavior of the given PAM. Such arguments will be documented for each individual
module. Note, if you wish to include spaces in an argument, you should surround that
argument with square brackets.

squid auth required pam_mysql.so user=passwd_query passwd=mada \
db=eminence [query=select user_name from internet_service \
where user_name='%u' and password=PASSWORD('%p') and \
service='web_proxy']

When using this convention, you can include `[' characters inside the string, and if you
wish to include a `]' character inside the string that will survive the argument parsing,
you should use `\]'. In other words:

[..[..\]..] --> ..[..]..

Any line in (one of) the configuration file(s), that is not formatted correctly, will
generally tend (erring on the side of caution) to make the authentication process fail. A
corresponding error is written to the system log files with a call to syslog(3).

More flexible than the single configuration file is it to configure libpam via the
contents of the /etc/pam.d/ directory. In this case the directory is filled with files
each of which has a filename equal to a service-name (in lower-case): it is the personal
configuration file for the named service.

The syntax of each file in /etc/pam.d/ is similar to that of the /etc/pam.conf file and is
made up of lines of the following form:

type control module-path module-arguments

The only difference being that the service-name is not present. The service-name is of
course the name of the given configuration file. For example, /etc/pam.d/login contains
the configuration for the login service.