Benefits of Using PAM

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

• 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 that are 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