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.

SEE ALSO

   pam(3), PAM(8), pam_start(3)





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