SASLAUTHD(8) BSD System Manager's Manual SASLAUTHD(8) NAME saslauthd - sasl authentication server SYNOPSIS saslauthd -a authmech [-Tvdchl] [-O option] [-m mux_path] [-n threads] [-s size] [-t timeout] DESCRIPTION saslauthd is a daemon process that handles plaintext authentication requests on behalf of the SASL library. The server fulfills two roles: it isolates all code requiring superuser privileges into a single process, and it can be used to provide proxy authentication services to clients that do not understand SASL based authentication. saslauthd should be started from the system boot scripts when going to multi-user mode. When running against a protected authentication database (e.g. the shadow mechanism), it must be run as the superuser. Options Options named by lower-case letters configure the server itself. Upper-case options control the behavior of specific authentication mecha- nisms; their applicability to a particular authentication mechanism is described in the AUTHENTICATION MECHANISMS section. -a authmech Use authmech as the authentication mechanism. (See the AUTHENTICATION MECHANISMS section below.) This parameter is mandatory. -O option A mechanism specific option (e.g. rimap hostname or config file path) -H hostname The remote host to be contacted by the rimap authentication mech- anism. (Depricated, use -O instead) -m path Use path as the pathname to the named socket to listen on for connection requests. This must be an absolute pathname, and MUST NOT include the trailing "/mux". Note that the default for this value is "/var/state/saslauthd" (or what was specified at compile time) and that this directory must exist for saslauthd to func- tion. -n threads Use threads processes for responding to authentication queries. (default: 5) A value of zero will indicate that saslauthd should fork an individual process for each connection. This can solve leaks that occur in some deployments.. -s size Use size as the table size of the hash table (in kilobytes) -t timeout Use timeout as the expiration time of the authentication cache (in seconds) -T Honour time-of-day login restrictions. -h Show usage information -c Enable cacheing of authentication credentials -l Disable the use of a lock file for controlling access to accept(). -v Print the version number and available authentication mechanisms on standard error, then exit. -d Debugging mode. Logging saslauthd logs it's activities via syslogd using the LOG_AUTH facility. AUTHENTICATION MECHANISMS saslauthd supports one or more "authentication mechanisms", dependent upon the facilities provided by the underlying operating system. The mechanism is selected by the -aho flag from the following list of choices: dce (AIX) Authenticate using the DCE authentication environment. getpwent (All platforms) Authenticate using the getpwent() library function. Typically this authenticates against the local password file. See your systems getpwent(3) man page for details. kerberos4 (All platforms) Authenticate against the local Kerberos 4 realm. (See the NOTES section for caveats about this driver.) kerberos5 (All platforms) Authenticate against the local Kerberos 5 realm. pam (Linux, Solaris) Authenticate using Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). rimap (All platforms) Forward authentication requests to a remote IMAP server. This driver connects to a remote IMAP server, specified using the -O flag, and attempts to login (via an IMAP `LOGIN' command) using the credentials supplied to the local server. If the remote authentication succeeds the local connection is also considered to be authenticated. The remote connection is closed as soon as the tagged response from the `LOGIN' command is received from the remote server. The option parameter to the -O flag describes the remote server to forward authentication requests to. hostname can be a hostname (imap.example.com) or a dotted-quad IP address (192.168.0.1). The latter is useful if the remote server is multi-homed and has network interfaces that are unreachable from the local IMAP server. The remote host is contacted on the `imap' service port. A non-default port can be specified by appending a slash and the port name or number to the hostname argument. The -O flag and argument are mandatory when using the rimap mechanism. shadow (AIX, Irix, Linux, Solaris) Authenticate against the local "shadow password file". The exact mechanism is system dependent. saslauthd currently understands the getspnam() and getuserpw() library routines. Some systems honour the -T flag. sasldb (All platforms) Authenticate against the SASL authentication database. Note that this is probabally not what you want to be using, and is even disabled at compile-time by default. If you want to use sasldb with the SASL library, you probably want to use the pwcheck_method of "auxprop" along with the sasldb auxprop plu- gin instead. ldap (All platforms that support OpenLDAP 2.0 or higher) Authenticate against an ldap server. The ldap configuration parameters are read from /usr/local/etc/saslauthd.conf. The location of this file can be changed with the -O parameter. See the LDAP_SASLAUTHD file included with the distribution for the list of available parameters. sia (Digital UNIX) Authenticate using the Digital UNIX Security Integration Architecture (a.k.a. "enhanced security"). NOTES The kerberos4 authentication driver consumes considerable resources. To perform an authentication it must obtain a ticket granting ticket from the TGT server on every authentication request. The Kerberos library rou- tines that obtain the TGT also create a local ticket file, on the reason- able assumption that you will want to save the TGT for use by other Ker- beros applications. These ticket files are unusable by saslauthd , how- ever there is no way not to create them. The overhead of creating and removing these ticket files can cause serious performance degradation on busy servers. (Kerberos was never intended to be used in this manner, anyway.) FILES /var/run/saslauthd/mux The default communications socket. /usr/local/etc/saslauthd.conf The default configuration file for ldap support. SEE ALSO passwd(1), getpwent(3), getspnam(3), getuserpw(3), sasl_checkpass(3) sia_authenticate_user(3), CMU-SASL 10 24 2002 CMU-SASL