Benefits of Using PAM

The PAM framework allows a system administrator to choose any combination of system entry services (ftp, login, telnet, or rsh, for example) for user authentication. Some of the benefits PAM provides are:

• Flexible configuration policy

  • Per application authentication policy

  • The ability to choose a default authentication mechanism

  • Multiple passwords on high-security systems

• Ease of use for the end user

  • No retyping of passwords if they are the same for different mechanisms

  • The ability to use a single password for multiple authentication methods with the password mapping feature, even if the passwords associated with each authentication method are different

  • The ability to prompt the user for passwords for multiple authentication methods without having the user enter multiple commands

• The ability to pass optional parameters to the user authentication services