Enterprise Cloud Security and Governance

The PAM command structure

We will look at an example of a reboot application that we understood earlier:

/etc/pam.d/rebootauth sufficient pam_rootok.soauth required pam_deny.so

The PAM configuration file generally follows a well defined structure. Let's look into individual columns that are present for the first configuration line:

• auth: Authentication interface. There are many more interfaces such as account, session, and password.
• sufficient: This dictates that if the result of the module has failed, then go to the next module defined in the next line of the configuration file; in our case, it is pam_deny.so.
• module-name: This is the place where we define which modules to use. Each module has its own functionality. For example, the pam_rootok.so ...