pam_authenticate(3) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PAM_AUTHENTICATE(3)         Linux-PAM Manual         PAM_AUTHENTICATE(3)

NAME         top

       pam_authenticate - account authentication

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <security/pam_appl.h>

       int pam_authenticate(pam_handle_t *pamh, int flags);

DESCRIPTION         top

       The pam_authenticate function is used to authenticate the user.
       The user is required to provide an authentication token depending
       upon the authentication service, usually this is a password, but
       could also be a finger print.

       The PAM service module may request that the user enter their
       username via the conversation mechanism (see pam_start(3) and
       pam_conv(3)). The name of the authenticated user will be present
       in the PAM item PAM_USER. This item may be recovered with a call
       to pam_get_item(3).

       The pamh argument is an authentication handle obtained by a prior
       call to pam_start(). The flags argument is the binary or of zero
       or more of the following values:

       PAM_SILENT
           Do not emit any messages.

       PAM_DISALLOW_NULL_AUTHTOK
           The PAM module service should return PAM_AUTH_ERR if the user
           does not have a registered authentication token.

RETURN VALUES         top

       PAM_ABORT
           The application should exit immediately after calling
           pam_end(3) first.

       PAM_AUTH_ERR
           The user was not authenticated.

       PAM_CRED_INSUFFICIENT
           For some reason the application does not have sufficient
           credentials to authenticate the user.

       PAM_AUTHINFO_UNAVAIL
           The modules were not able to access the authentication
           information. This might be due to a network or hardware
           failure etc.

       PAM_MAXTRIES
           One or more of the authentication modules has reached its
           limit of tries authenticating the user. Do not try again.

       PAM_SUCCESS
           The user was successfully authenticated.

       PAM_USER_UNKNOWN
           User unknown to authentication service.

SEE ALSO         top

       pam_start(3), pam_setcred(3), pam_chauthtok(3), pam_strerror(3),
       pam(8)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the linux-pam (Pluggable Authentication
       Modules for Linux) project.  Information about the project can be
       found at ⟨http://www.linux-pam.org/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see ⟨//www.linux-pam.org/⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2023-12-18.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Linux-PAM Manual               12/22/2023            PAM_AUTHENTICATE(3)

Pages that refer to this page: pam(3)pam_acct_mgmt(3)pam_chauthtok(3)pam_fail_delay(3)pam_setcred(3)pam_set_data(3)pam_sm_authenticate(3)pam_sm_setcred(3)PAM(8)pam_filter(8)