PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) allows system administrators to choose how applications authenticate users. Note that PAM can do nothing unless an application is compiled with support for PAM. Most of the applications that are shipped with Debian have this support built in (Debian did not have PAM support before 2.2). The current default configuration for any PAM-enabled service is to emulate UNIX authentication (read /usr/share/doc/libpam0g/Debian-PAM-MiniPolicy.gz for more information on how PAM services should work in Debian).

Each application with PAM support provides a configuration file in /etc/pam.d/ which can be used to modify its behavior:

The following description is far from complete, for more information you might want to read the Linux-PAM Guides as a reference. This documentation is available in the system if you install the libpam-doc at /usr/share/doc/libpam-doc/html/.

PAM offers you the possibility to go through several authentication steps at once, without the user's knowledge. You could authenticate against a Berkeley database and against the normal passwd file, and the user only logs in if the authentication succeeds in both. You can restrict a lot with PAM, just as you can open your system doors very wide. So be careful. A typical configuration line has a control field as its second element. Generally it should be set to requisite, which returns a login failure if one module fails.

Review the /etc/pam.d/common-password, included by /etc/pam.d/passwd^[16] This file is included by other files in /etc/pam.d/ to define the behaviour of password use in subsystems that grant access to services in the machine, like the console login (login), graphical login managers (such as gdm or lightdm), and remote login (such as sshd). This definition is

You have to make sure that the pam_unix.so module uses the "sha512" option to use encrypted passwords. This is the default in Debian Squeeze.

The line with the definition of the pam_unix module will look something like:

  password   [success=1 default=ignore]      pam_unix.so nullok obscure minlen=8 sha512 

This definition:

You have to ensure that encrypted passwords are used in PAM applications, since this helps protect against dictionary cracks. Using encryption also makes it possible to use passwords longer than 8 characters.

Since this module is also used to define how passwords are changed (it is included by chpasswd) you can strengthen the password security in the system by installing libpam-cracklib and introducing this definition in the /etc/pam.d/common-password configuration file:

  # Be sure to install libpam-cracklib first or you will not be able to log in
  password   required     pam_cracklib.so retry=3 minlen=12 difok=3
  password   [success=1 default=ignore]      pam_unix.so obscure minlen=8 sha512 use_authok

So, what does this incantation do? The first line loads the cracklib PAM module, which provides password strength-checking, prompts for a new password with a minimum size ^[17] of 12 characters, and difference of at least 3 characters from the old password, and allows 3 retries. Cracklib depends on a wordlist package (such as wenglish, wspanish, wbritish, ...), so make sure you install one that is appropriate for your language or cracklib might not be useful to you at all.

The second line (using the pam_unix.so module) is the default configuration in Debian, as described above, save for the use_authok option. The use_authok option is required if pam_unix.so is stacked after pam_cracklib.so, and is used to hand over the password from the previous module. Otherwise, the user would be prompted for the password twice.

For more information about setting up Cracklib, read the pam_cracklib(8) manpage and the article Linux Password Security with pam_cracklib by Hal Pomeranz.

By enabling the cracklib PAM module you setup a policy that forces uses to use strong passwords.

Alternatively, you can setup and configure PAM modules to use double factor authentication such as: libpam-barada, libpam-google-authenticator, libpam-oath, libpam-otpw, libpam-poldi, libpam-usb or libpam-yubico. The configuration of these modules would make it possible to access the system using external authentication mechanisms such as smartcards, external USB keys, or One-Time-Passwords generated by external applications running, for example, in the user's mobile phone.

Please note that these restrictions apply to all users but not to the password changes done by the root user. The root user will be able to set up any password (any length or complexity) for personal use or others regardless of the restrictions defined here.

To make sure that the user root can only log into the system from local terminals, the following line should be enabled in /etc/pam.d/login:

  auth     requisite  pam_securetty.so

Then you should modify the list of terminals on which direct root login is allowed in /etc/securetty (as described in Section 4.7, “Restricting console login access ”). Alternatively, you could enable the pam_access module and modify /etc/security/access.conf which allows for a more general and fine-tuned access control, but (unfortunately) lacks decent log messages (logging within PAM is not standardized and is particularly unrewarding problem to deal with). We'll return to access.conf a little later.

The following line should be enabled in /etc/pam.d/login to set up user resource limits.

  session  required   pam_limits.so

This restricts the system resources that users are allowed (see below in Section 4.11.8, “Limiting resource usage: the limits.conf file”). For example, you could restrict the number of concurrent logins (of a given group of users, or system-wide), number of processes, memory size etc.

If you want to protect su, so that only some people can use it to become root on your system, you need to add a new group "wheel" to your system (that is the cleanest way, since no file has such a group permission yet). Add root and the other users that should be able to su to the root user to this group. Then add the following line to /etc/pam.d/su:

  auth        requisite   pam_wheel.so group=wheel debug

This makes sure that only people from the group "wheel" can use su to become root. Other users will not be able to become root. In fact they will get a denied message if they try to become root.

If you want only certain users to authenticate at a PAM service, this is quite easy to achieve by using files where the users who are allowed to login (or not) are stored. Imagine you only want to allow users 'ref' to log in via ssh. So you put them into /etc/sshusers-allowed and write the following into /etc/pam.d/ssh:

  auth        required    pam_listfile.so item=user sense=allow file=/etc/sshusers-allowed onerr=fail

Since there have been a number of so called insecure tempfile vulnerabilities, thttpd is one example (see DSA-883-1), the libpam-tmpdir is a good package to install. All you have to do is add the following to /etc/pam.d/common-session:

 session    optional     pam_tmpdir.so

There has also been a discussion about adding this by default in Debian configuration, but it s. See http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/11/msg00297.html for more information.

Finally, but not least, create /etc/pam.d/other and enter the following lines:

  auth     required       pam_securetty.so
  auth     required       pam_unix_auth.so
  auth     required       pam_warn.so
  auth     required       pam_deny.so
  account  required       pam_unix_acct.so
  account  required       pam_warn.so
  account  required       pam_deny.so
  password required       pam_unix_passwd.so
  password required       pam_warn.so
  password required       pam_deny.so
  session  required       pam_unix_session.so
  session  required       pam_warn.so
  session  required       pam_deny.so

These lines will provide a good default configuration for all applications that support PAM (access is denied by default).

You should really take a serious look into this file. Here you can define user resource limits. In old releases this configuration file was /etc/limits.conf, but in newer releases (with PAM) the /etc/security/limits.conf configuration file should be used instead.

If you do not restrict resource usage, any user with a valid shell in your system (or even an intruder who compromised the system through a service or a daemon going awry) can use up as much CPU, memory, stack, etc. as the system can provide. This resource exhaustion problem can be fixed by the use of PAM.

There is a way to add resource limits to some shells (for example, bash has ulimit, see bash(1)), but since not all of them provide the same limits and since the user can change shells (see chsh(1)) it is better to place the limits on the PAM modules as they will apply regardless of the shell used and will also apply to PAM modules that are not shell-oriented.

Resource limits are imposed by the kernel, but they need to be configured through the limits.conf and the PAM configuration of the different services need to load the appropriate PAM. You can check which services are enforcing limits by running:

$ find /etc/pam.d/ \! -name "*.dpkg*" | xargs -- grep limits |grep -v ":#"

Commonly, login, ssh and the graphic session managers (gdm, kdm or xdm) should enforce user limits but you might want to do this in other PAM configuration files, such as cron, to prevent system daemons from taking over all system resources.

The specific limits settings you might want to enforce depend on your system's resources, that's one of the main reasons why no limits are enforced in the default installation.

For example, the configuration example below enforces a 100 process limit for all users (to prevent fork bombs) as well as a limit of 10MB of memory per process and a limit of 10 simultaneous logins. Users in the adm group have higher limits and can produce core files if they want to (there is only a soft limit).

*              soft    core            0
*              hard    core            0
*              hard    rss             1000
*              hard    memlock         1000
*              hard    nproc           100
*              -       maxlogins       1
*              hard    data            102400
*              hard    fsize           2048
@adm           hard    core            100000
@adm           hard    rss             100000
@adm           soft    nproc           2000
@adm           hard    nproc           3000
@adm           hard    fsize           100000
@adm           -       maxlogins       10

These would be the limits a default user (including system daemons) would have:

$ ulimit -a
core file size        (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size         (kbytes, -d) 102400
file size             (blocks, -f) 2048
max locked memory     (kbytes, -l) 10000
max memory size       (kbytes, -m) 10000
open files                    (-n) 1024
pipe size          (512 bytes, -p) 8
stack size            (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time             (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes            (-u) 100
virtual memory        (kbytes, -v) unlimited

And these are the limits for an administrative user:

$ ulimit -a
core file size        (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size         (kbytes, -d) 102400
file size             (blocks, -f) 100000
max locked memory     (kbytes, -l) 100000
max memory size       (kbytes, -m) 100000
open files                    (-n) 1024
pipe size          (512 bytes, -p) 8
stack size            (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time             (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes            (-u) 2000
virtual memory        (kbytes, -v) unlimited

For more information read:

The next step is to edit the basic configuration and action upon user login. Note that this file is not part of the PAM configuration, it's a configuration file honored by login and su programs, so it doesn't make sense tuning it for cases where neither of the two programs are at least indirectly called (the getty program which sits on the consoles and offers the initial login prompt does invoke login).

  FAILLOG_ENAB        yes

If you enable this variable, failed logins will be logged. It is important to keep track of them to catch someone who tries a brute force attack.

  LOG_UNKFAIL_ENAB    no

If you set this variable to 'yes' it will record unknown usernames if the login failed. It is best if you use 'no' (the default) since, otherwise, user passwords might be inadvertenly logged here (if a user mistypes and they enter their password as the username). If you set it to 'yes', make sure the logs have the proper permissions (640 for example, with an appropriate group setting such as adm).

  SYSLOG_SU_ENAB      yes

This one enables logging of su attempts to syslog. Quite important on serious machines but note that this can create privacy issues as well.

  SYSLOG_SG_ENAB      yes

The same as SYSLOG_SU_ENAB but applies to the sg program.

  ENCRYPT_METHOD  SHA512

As stated above, encrypted passwords greatly reduce the problem of dictionary attacks, since you can use longer passwords. This definition has to be consistent with the value defined in /etc/pam.d/common-password.

You can adjust the login configuration file to implement an stricter policy. For example, you can change the default configuration and increase the delay time between login prompts. The default configuration sets a 3 seconds delay:

auth       optional   pam_faildelay.so  delay=3000000

Increasing the delay value to a higher value to make it harder to use the terminal to log in using brute force. If a wrong password is typed in, the possible attacker (or normal user!) has to wait longer seconds to get a new login prompt, which is quite time consuming when you test passwords. For example, if you set delay=10000000, users will have to wait 10 seconds if they type a wrong password.

In this file you can also set the system to present a message to users before a user logs in. The default is disabled, as shown below:

# auth       required   pam_issue.so issue=/etc/issue

If required by your security policy, this file can be used to show a standard message indicating that access to the system is restricted and user acess is logged. This kind of disclaimer might be required in some environments and jurisdictions. To enable it, just include the relevant information in the /etc/issue^[18] file and uncomment the line enabling the pam_issue.so module in /etc/pam.d/login. In this file you can also enable additional features which might be relevant to apply local security policies such as:

The /etc/ftpusers file contains a list of users who are not allowed to log into the host using ftp. Only use this file if you really want to allow ftp (which is not recommended in general, because it uses clear-text passwords). If your daemon supports PAM, you can also use that to allow and deny users for certain services.

FIXME (BUG): Is it a bug that the default ftpusers in Debian does not include all the administrative users (in base-passwd).

A convenient way to add all system accounts to the /etc/ftpusers is to run

$ awk -F : '{if ($3<1000) print $1}' /etc/passwd > /etc/ftpusers

If you really need users to become the super user on your system, e.g. for installing packages or adding users, you can use the command su to change your identity. You should try to avoid any login as user root and instead use su. Actually, the best solution is to remove su and switch to the sudo mechanism which has a broader logic and more features than su. However, su is more common as it is used on many other Unices.

sudo allows the user to execute defined commands under another user's identity, even as root. If the user is added to /etc/sudoers and authenticates correctly, the commands defined in /etc/sudoers get enabled. Violations, such as incorrect passwords or trying to run a program you don't have permission for, are logged and mailed to root.

You should also modify /etc/security/access.conf to disallow remote logins to administrative accounts. This way users need to invoke su (or sudo) to use any administrative powers and the appropriate audit trace will always be generated.

You need to add the following line to /etc/security/access.conf, the default Debian configuration file has a sample line commented out:

   -:wheel:ALL EXCEPT LOCAL

Remember to enable the pam_access module for every service (or default configuration) in /etc/pam.d/ if you want your changes to /etc/security/access.conf honored.

Sometimes you might think you need to have users created in your local system in order to provide a given service (pop3 mail service or ftp). Before doing so, first remember that the PAM implementation in Debian GNU/Linux allows you to validate users with a wide variety of external directory services (radius, ldap, etc.) provided by the libpam packages.

If users need to be created and the system can be accessed remotely take into account that users will be able to log in to the system. You can fix this by giving users a null (/dev/null) shell (it would need to be listed in /etc/shells). If you want to allow users to access the system but limit their movements, you can use the /bin/rbash, equivalent to adding the -r option in bash (RESTRICTED SHELL see bash(1) ). Please note that even with restricted shell, a user that access an interactive program (that might allow execution of a subshell) could be able to bypass the limits of the shell.

Debian currently provides in the unstable release (and might be included in the next stable releases) the pam_chroot module (in the libpam-chroot). An alternative to it is to chroot the service that provides remote logging (ssh, telnet). ^[19]

If you wish to restrict when users can access the system you will have to customize /etc/security/access.conf for your needs.

Information on how to chroot users accessing the system through the ssh service is described in Section B.7, “Chroot environment for SSH”.

If you are really paranoid you might want to add a system-wide configuration to audit what the users are doing in your system. This sections presents some tips using diverse utilities you can use.

umask 077
exec script -q -a "/var/log/sessions/$USER"

umask 077
exec script -q -a "/var/log/sessions/$USER-`date +%Y%m%d`"

  HISTFILE=~/.bash_history
  HISTSIZE=10000
  HISTFILESIZE=999999
  # Don't let the users enter commands that are ignored
  # in the history file
  HISTIGNORE=""
  HISTCONTROL=""
  readonly HISTFILE
  readonly HISTSIZE
  readonly HISTFILESIZE
  readonly HISTIGNORE
  readonly HISTCONTROL
  export HISTFILE HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE HISTIGNORE HISTCONTROL

If you want to see what users are actually doing when they logon to the system you can use the wtmp database that includes all login information. This file can be processed with several utilities, amongst them sac which can output a profile on each user showing in which timeframe they usually log on to the system.

In case you have accounting activated, you can also use the tools provided by it in order to determine when the users access the system and what do they execute.

Depending on your user policy you might want to change how information is shared between users, that is, what the default permissions of new files created by users are.

Debian's default umask setting is 022 this means that files (and directories) can be read and accessed by the user's group and by any other users in the system. This definition is set in the standard configuration file /etc/profile which is used by all shells.

If Debian's default value is too permissive for your system you will have to change the umask setting for all the shells. More restrictive umask settings include 027 (no access is allowed to new files for the other group, i.e. to other users in the system) or 077 (no access is allowed to new files to the members the user's group). Debian (by default^[23]) creates one group per user so that only the user is included in its group. Consequently 027 and 077 are equivalent as the user's group contains only the user.

This change is set by defining a proper umask setting for all users. You can change this by introducing an umask call in the shell configuration files: /etc/profile (source by all Bourne-compatible shells), /etc/csh.cshrc, /etc/csh.login, /etc/zshrc and probably some others (depending on the shells you have installed on your system). You can also change the UMASK setting in /etc/login.defs, Of all of these the last one that gets loaded by the shell takes precedence. The order is: the default system configuration for the user's shell (i.e. /etc/profile and other system-wide configuration files) and then the user's shell (his ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile, etc...). Some shells, however, can be executed with a nologin value which might skip sourcing some of those files. See your shell's manpage for additional information.

For connections that make use of login the UMASK definition in /etc/login.defs is used before any of the others. However, that value does not apply to user executed programs that do not use login such as those run through su, cron or ssh.

Don't forget to review and maybe modify the dotfiles under /etc/skel/ since these will be new user's defaults when created with the adduser command. Debian default dotfiles do not include any umask call but if there is any in the dotfiles newly created users might a different value.

Note, however that users can modify their own umask setting if they want to, making it more permissive or more restricted, by changing their own dotfiles.

The libpam-umask package adjusts the users' default umask using PAM. Add the following, after installing the package, to /etc/pam.d/common-session:

session    optional     pam_umask.so umask=077

Finally, you should consider changing root's default 022 umask (as defined in /root/.bashrc) to a more strict umask. That will prevent the system administrator from inadvertenly dropping sensitive files when working as root to world-readable directories (such as /tmp) and having them available for your average user.

FIXME: Content needed. Describe the consequences of changing packages permissions when upgrading (an admin this paranoid should chroot his users BTW) if not using dpkg-statoverride.

If you need to grant users access to the system with a shell think about it very carefully. A user can, by default unless in a severely restricted environment (like a chroot jail), retrieve quite a lot of information from your system including:

What can a user see in your system? Probably quite a lot of things, try this (take a deep breath):

  find / -type f -a -perm +006 2>/dev/null  
  find / -type d -a -perm +007 2>/dev/null

The output is the list of files that a user can see and the accessable directories.

There are many cases when an administrator needs to create many user accounts and provide passwords for all of them. Of course, the administrator could easily just set the password to be the same as the user's account name, but that would not be very sensitive security-wise. A better approach is to use a password generating program. Debian provides makepasswd, apg and pwgen packages which provide programs (the name is the same as the package) that can be used for this purpose. Makepasswd will generate true random passwords with an emphasis on security over pronounceability while pwgen will try to make meaningless but pronounceable passwords (of course this might depend on your mother language). Apg has algorithms to provide for both (there is a client/server version for this program but it is not included in the Debian package).

Passwd does not allow non-interactive assignation of passwords (since it uses direct tty access). If you want to change passwords when creating a large number of users you can create them using adduser with the --disabled-login option and then use usermod or chpasswd^[24] (both from the passwd package so you already have them installed). If you want to use a file with all the information to make users as a batch process you might be better off using newusers.

User passwords can sometimes become the weakest link in the security of a given system. This is due to some users choosing weak passwords for their accounts (and the more of them that have access to it the greater the chances of this happening). Even if you established checks with the cracklib PAM module and password limits as described in Section 4.11.1, “User authentication: PAM” users will still be able to use weak passwords. Since user access might include remote shell access (over ssh, hopefully) it's important to make password guessing as hard as possible for the remote attackers, especially if they were somehow able to collect important information such as usernames or even the passwd and shadow files themselves.

A system administrator must, given a big number of users, check if the passwords they have are consistent with the local security policy. How to check? Try to crack them as an attacker would if having access to the hashed passwords (the /etc/shadow file).

An administrator can use john or crack (both are brute force password crackers) together with an appropriate wordlist to check users' passwords and take appropriate action when a weak password is detected. You can search for Debian GNU packages that contain word lists using apt-cache search wordlist, or visit some Internet wordlist sites.

Idle users are usually a security problem, a user might be idle maybe because he's out to lunch or because a remote connection hung and was not re-established. For whatever the reason, idle users might lead to a compromise:

Some remote systems have even been compromised through an idle (and detached) screen.

Automatic disconnection of idle users is usually a part of the local security policy that must be enforced. There are several ways to do this:

The timeoutd or autolog daemons are the preferred method since, after all, users can change their default shell or can, after running their default shell, switch to another (uncontrolled) shell.