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node-authenticate-pam

Asynchronous PAM authentication for NodeJS

You will most likely need to run it as root in most common environments! Running as non-root on my system (openSUSE 12.1) made a segfault happen somewhere in libpam! - but seems ok on on openSUSE Leap 42.2

It tries to superseed the previous and outdated node-pam extension with the following improvements:

  • Allows to provide own service name, for example common-auth or any custom service name defined in /etc/pam.d
  • Allows to provide PAM_RHOST via 'remoteHost' option. It is used to provide remote network authentication that will skip any local only authentication methods like for example fingerprint reading.
  • Already mentioned utilization of libuv and node-gyp
  • Proper type checking in C++ code, it throws exception if bad types are given
  • In case of error it passes the error string containing both pam function and pam_strerror() results

Example

Simple usage

Default service_name for pam_start(2) is 'login'.

var pam = require('authenticate-pam');
pam.authenticate('myusername', 'mysecretpassword', function(err) {
    if(err) {
      console.log(err);
    }
    else {
      console.log("Authenticated!");
    }
  });

Usage with options:

Proper apps should provide their own service name. Sample services are located in /etc/pam.d. As an example lookup a service name file for sshd. To do proper network authentication you should also provide remoteHost key to the options argument. It will be passed to pam as PAM_RHOST (pam_set_item(2))

var pam = require('authenticate-pam');
pam.authenticate('rush', 'mysecretpassword', function(err) {
    if(err) {
      console.log(err);
    }
    else {
      console.log("Authenticated!");
    }
}, {serviceName: 'myapp', remoteHost: 'localhost'});

Install

First you need install the development version of PAM libraries for your distro.

Centos and RHEL: yum install pam-devel

Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install libpam0g-dev

debian6/maverick/natty: apt-get install libreadline5-dev

oneiric (and any newer, eg. Debian 7 or Ubuntu 12.04): apt-get install libreadline-gplv2-dev

Then you can install the module: npm install authenticate-pam