Linux PAM Security Administration

PAM provides dynamic authentication support that sits between Linux applications and Linux native authentication systems. It is one of the main tools that deals with authentication. The main purpose of PAM is to allow system administrators to integrate services or programs with different authentication mechanisms without changing the code for the service.

This short course consists of three sections. In the first section, the author introduces you to the course and what to expect from the course. In the second section, you will learn to install VirtualBox in your systems and create your first virtual machine. Following this, you will be installing CentOS 7 and 8 onto your systems.

In the third and last section of the course, you will learn about Linux PAM security, where you will understand the importance of PAM. You will get to know the PAM configuration file and the columns within the file; namely, the module interface, control flags, and modules one by one. In the last part of the section, you will explore PAM-aware services and stacks and verify if a service or a program is linked with PAM.

By the end of the course, you will be able to understand why PAM is important and how to configure it.

What You Will Learn

• Installation of VirtualBox and CentOS
• Learn about the module interface column in PAM file
• Learn about the control flags column in PAM
• Learn about the module column in PAM file
• Learn the importance of PAM and its necessity
• Learn account access through PAM

Audience

This course is designed for Linux administrators and beginners and for anyone interested in learning about security in Linux servers. No prior knowledge of Linux is required to take this course.

About The Author

Imran Afzal: Imran Afzal is a systems engineer/manager, entrepreneur, instructor, and a public speaker. He started his career with Time Warner in 2000 as a systems administrator. He was involved in deploying technologies such as DTV, VOD, CableCards, and others. These technologies were built on many Linux distributions. Since then, he has utilized Linux/Unix skills in many Fortune 500 companies.

He has worn many different hats and currently manages a large team of systems engineers, administrators and team leads globally. He has spearheaded projects such as datacenter migration, introduction, and deployment of VMware, monitoring tools implementation, Amazon cloud migration, and many more. He is certified in Linux Systems Management, UNIX Operating Systems, Linux System Administration, System Internals, VMWare Certified Professional, RHCSA, and Windows Server Certified.