PingIntelligence

Configuring Linux PAM authentication

About this task

PAM-based authentication provides the flexibility to authenticate administrators using existing authentication servers, such as your organization’s directory. When PAM authentication is active, ASE logs the identity of the user executing each CLI command. This provides a user-specific audit trail of administrative access to the ASE system.

Steps

  • To activate PAM-based authentication, configure auth_method in ase.conf as pam::<service>,where <service> is the script that the PAM module reads to authenticate the users.

    Service scripts include login, su, ldap, etc. For example, the login script allows all system users administrative access to ASE.

  • To support PAM authentication with the login script, update the auth_method configuration values in ase.conf:

    auth_method=pam::login

    Example:

    The following is an example using the CLI to change from Native to PAM authentication with login script:

    /opt/pingidentity/ase/bin/cli.sh update_auth_method pam::login -u admin -p
 <password>

    Make sure that the script name provided for PAM-based authentication is the correct one. If a wrong file name is provided, ASE administrators are locked out of ASE.

  • To write your own PAM module script, add a custom script, such as ldap, that defines PAM’s behavior for user authentication to the /etc/pam.d directory.

  • To set the authentication method and use the ldap script, run the following command:

    /opt/pingidentity/ase/bin/cli.sh update_auth_method pam::ldap -u admin -p
 <password>

    Example:

    In the following example, the PAM module uses the organization’s LDAP server to authenticate users.

    root@localhost:/# cat /etc/pam.d/ldap
auth   sufficient   pam_ldap.so     # Authenticate with LDAP server.
#auth  sufficient   pam_permit.so   # Allow everyone. Pass-through mode.
#auth  sufficient   pam_deny.so     # Disallow everyone. Block all access.