PAM Authentication Plugin
Percona PAM Authentication Plugin is a free and Open Source implementation of the MySQL‘s authentication plugin. This plugin acts as a mediator between the MySQL server, the MySQL client, and the PAM stack. The server plugin requests authentication from the PAM stack, forwards any requests and messages from the PAM stack over the wire to the client (in cleartext) and reads back any replies for the PAM stack.
PAM plugin uses dialog as its client side plugin. Dialog plugin can be loaded to any client application that uses libmysqlclient library.
Here are some of the benefits that Percona dialog plugin offers over the default one:
- It correctly recognizes whether PAM wants input to be echoed or not, while the default one always echoes the input on the user’s console.
- It can use the password which is passed to MySQL client via “-p” parameter.
- Dialog client installation bug has been fixed.
- This plugin works on MySQL and Percona Server.
Percona offers two versions of this plugin:
- Full PAM plugin called auth_pam. This plugin uses dialog.so. It fully supports the PAM protocol with arbitrary communication between client and server.
- Oracle-compatible PAM called auth_pam_compat. This plugin uses mysql_clear_password which is a part of Oracle MySQL client. It also has some limitations, such as, it supports only one password input. You must use -p option in order to pass the password to auth_pam_compat.
These two versions of plugins are physically different. To choose which one you want used, you must use IDENTIFIED WITH ‘auth_pam’ for auth_pam, and IDENTIFIED WITH ‘auth_pam_compat’ for auth_pam_compat.
Installation
This plugin requires manual installation because it isn’t installed by default.
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN auth_pam SONAME 'auth_pam.so';
After the plugin has been installed it should be present in the plugins list. To check if the plugin has been correctly installed and active
mysql> SHOW PLUGINS;
...
...
| auth_pam | ACTIVE | AUTHENTICATION | auth_pam.so | GPL |
Configuration
In order to use the plugin, authentication method should be configured. Simple setup can be to use the standard UNIX authentication method (pam_unix).
Note
To use pam_unix, mysql will need to be added to the shadow group in order to have enough privileges to read the /etc/shadow.
A sample /etc/pam.d/mysqld file:
auth required pam_unix.so
account required pam_unix.so
For added information in the system log, you can expand it to be:
auth required pam_warn.so
auth required pam_unix.so audit
account required pam_unix.so audit
Creating a user
After the PAM plugin has been configured, users can be created with the PAM plugin as authentication method
mysql> CREATE USER 'newuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH auth_pam;
This will create a user newuser that can connect from localhost who will be authenticated using the PAM plugin. If the pam_unix method is being used user will need to exist on the system.
