Pluggable Authentication Module


Pluggable Authentication Module

(security)(PAM) The new industry standard integrated loginframework. PAM is used by system entry components, such asthe Common Desktop Environment's dtlogin, to authenticateusers logging into a Unix system. It provides pluggabilityfor a variety of system-entry services. PAM's ability tostack authentication modules can be used to integratelogin with different authentication mechanisms such asRSA, DCE and Kerberos, and thus unify login mechanisms.PAM can also integrate smart card authentication.

White paper.

[OSF-RFC 86.0 V. Samar, R. Schemers, "Unified Login withPluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)", Oct 1995].