PAM: Pluggable Authentication Modules

The Linux Voice journal has published an article on Pluggable Authentication Modules(PAM).

Pluggable Authentication Modules (known to its friends as PAM) is one of those technologies that most users are entirely unaware of, like the engine management computer in their Volvo. Basically, PAM provides a framework within which an application can assemble one or more stacks of PAM modules to perform the authentication tasks it needs to perform and to implement the security policy that it (or the system administrator) wants to implement.

From a system administrator’s point of view, PAM has two parts. The first is a set of configuration files in /etc/pam.d that define how an application’s PAM stacks are to be assembled. The config file is usually named after the application, so that (for example) the file for the ssh daemon would be..

Read complete article in Linux Voice Portal.

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