Usability issue when forced to change password when logging in to a system

Darren Tucker dtucker at zip.com.au
Sat Jan 24 09:27:58 AEDT 2015


On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Iain Morgan <imorgan at nas.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
> As I recall, OpenSSH does not use PAM to implement password changes;
>

Actually it does (via pam_chauthtok() but only when you are using
keyboard-interactive and it has a reliable way to talk to to the user.


> instead, it executes the system's passwd binary.


It does that when you are not using PAM, or when you are using PAM with
"password" authentication (it can't call pam_chauthtok() in the latter case
because by the time it can talk to the user via a tty, it has long since
dropped the privilege required to actually change the password.

-- 
Darren Tucker (dtucker at zip.com.au)
GPG key 8FF4FA69 / D9A3 86E9 7EEE AF4B B2D4  37C9 C982 80C7 8FF4 FA69
    Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.


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