pam(3)
12 September 1995
NAME
PAM − Pluggable Authentication Module
SYNOPSIS
Pluggable Authentication Module is a security framework to provide
integrated login.
DESCRIPTION
PAM gives system administrators the flexibility of choosing any authentication service available on the system to perform authentication. The framework also allows new authentication service modules to be plugged in and made available without modifying the applications.
The PAM framework, libpam, consists of an interface library and multiple authentication service modules. The PAM interface library is the layer implementing the Application Programming Interface (API). The authentication service modules are a set of dynamically loadable objects invoked by the PAM API to provide a particular type of user authentication.
Administrative Interface
The authentication libraries, /usr/lib/libpam.1 and /usr/lib/libpam.a, implement the framework interface. Various authentication services are implemented by their own loadable modules whose paths are specified through the pam.conf(4) file.
SEE ALSO
WARNING
Please note that all the PAM APIs and the data structures are subject to change without notice.
Hewlett-PAckard Company — HP-UX 10.20 April 1996