node-authenticate-pam's Introduction

node-authenticate-pam

Asynchronous PAM authentication for NodeJS 0.10 and 0.12

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!

It tries to superseed the previous and outdated node-pam extension with the following improvements: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