The pam_access PAM module is mainly for access management. It provides logdaemon style login access control based on login names, host or domain names, internet addresses or network numbers, or on terminal line names in case of non-networked logins.

By default rules for access management are taken from config file /etc/security/access.conf if you don't specify another file.

The /etc/security/access.conf file specifies (user, host), (user, network/netmask) or (user, tty) combinations for which a login will be either accepted or refused.

When someone logs in, the file access.conf is scanned for the first entry that matches the (user, host) or (user, network/netmask) combination, or, in case of non-networked logins, the first entry that matches the (user, tty) combination. The permissions field of that table entry determines whether the login will be accepted or refused.

Each line of the login access control table has three fields separated by a ":" character (colon):

permission:users:origins

The first field, the permission field, can be either a "+" character (plus) for access granted or a "-" character (minus) for access denied.

The second field, the users field, should be a list of one or more login names, group names, or ALL (which always matches).

The third field, the origins field, should be a list of one or more tty names (for non-networked logins), host names, domain names (begin with "."), host addresses, internet network numbers (end with "."), internet network addresses with network mask (where network mask can be a decimal number or an internet address also), ALL (which always matches) or LOCAL (which matches any string that does not contain a "." character). If supported by the system you can use @netgroupname in host or user patterns.

The except operator makes it possible to write very compact rules.

The group file is searched only when a name does not match that of the logged-in user. Only groups are matched in which users are explicitly listed. However the PAM module does not look at the primary group id of a user.

The "#" character at start of line (no space at front) can be used to mark this line as a comment line.

All services are supported.

These are some example lines which might be specified in /etc/security/access.conf.

User root should be allowed to get access via cron, X11 terminal :0, tty1, ..., tty5, tty6.

+ : root : crond :0 tty1 tty2 tty3 tty4 tty5 tty6

User root should be allowed to get access from hosts which own the IPv4 addresses. This does not mean that the connection have to be a IPv4 one, a IPv6 connection from a host with one of this IPv4 addresses does work, too.

+ : root : 192.168.200.1 192.168.200.4 192.168.200.9

+ : root : 127.0.0.1

User root should get access from network 192.168.201. where the term will be evaluated by string matching. But it might be better to use network/netmask instead. The same meaning of 192.168.201. is 192.168.201.0/24 or 192.168.201.0/255.255.255.0.

+ : root : 192.168.201.

User root should be able to have access from hosts foo1.bar.org and foo2.bar.org (uses string matching also).

+ : root : foo1.bar.org foo2.bar.org

User root should be able to have access from domain foo.bar.org (uses string matching also).

+ : root : .foo.bar.org

User root should be denied to get access from all other sources.

- : root : ALL

User foo and members of netgroup admins should be allowed to get access from all sources. This will only work if netgroup service is available.

+ : @admins foo : ALL

User john and foo should get access from IPv6 host address.

+ : john foo : 2001:4ca0:0:101::1

User john should get access from IPv6 net/mask.

+ : john : 2001:4ca0:0:101::/64

All other users should be denied to get access from all sources.

- : ALL : ALL

The logdaemon style login access control scheme was designed and implemented by Wietse Venema. The pam_access PAM module was developed by Alexei Nogin <alexei@nogin.dnttm.ru>. The IPv6 support and the network(address) / netmask feature was developed and provided by Mike Becher <mike.becher@lrz-muenchen.de>.