pam-weblogin

PAM WebLogin module in C

Wiki

Accompanying wiki page for this project https://edu.nl/hjhqc

Installation

Dependancies: libpam and libcurl. Install the dev packages for these libraries, then

$ make
$ make install

This copies the pam module to /usr/local/lib/security, creates an example configuration file in /etc/security/pam-weblogin.conf and a pam example configuration in /etc/pam.d/weblogin:

Unit tests

To run unit tests, install check and run

make unittest

In addition, to show coverage of the tests, run:

make clean
make unittest COVERAGE=1
make coverage

Testing

Change into the server directory.

Create and activate python virtualenv, pip install -r requirements.txt copy weblogin_daemon.yml.example to weblogin_daemon.yml and run weblogin_daemon.py weblogin_daemon.yml as a stub server on localhost:5001

Install pamtester to test the module (see above under Installation)

$ pamtester weblogin [username] authenticate
Hello [username]. To continue, visit http://localhost:5001/pam-weblogin/login/yqxvIDZV and enter pin
Pin:
Authenticated on attribute username
pamtester: successfully authenticated

Production (example)

This example enables PAM WebLogin and requires either publickey or password authentication:

Edit sshd as follows (add the line above @include common-auth)

/etc/pam.d/sshd

# PAM configuration for the Secure Shell service

auth [success=done ignore=ignore default=die] /usr/local/lib/security/pam_weblogin.so /etc/security/pam-weblogin.conf
# Standard Un*x authentication.
@include common-auth

If you put these lines above the auth required line:

auth [success=4 default=ignore] pam_access.so accessfile=/etc/security/exclude_iprange.conf
auth [success=3 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet user ingroup admin
auth [success=2 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet uid < 70000000
auth [success=1 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet uid > 72999999

Logins coming from exclude range, users in the admin group and uids between 70000000 and 72999999 are allowed to continue without pam-weblogin.

Set the following configurations in sshd_config and restart sshd

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

AuthenticationMethods publickey keyboard-interactive:pam
PubkeyAuthentication yes
KbdInteractiveAuthentication yes
UsePAM yes

Mind that in this example the line AuthenticationMethods signifies the option of authenticating either via publickey or keyboard-interactive (pam).

Add the pam-weblogin.conf and make it readable only for root (chmod 600 /etc/seucrity/pam-weblogin.conf, chown root.root /etc/security/pam-weblogin.conf).

/etc/security/pam-weblogin.conf

url = https://sram.surf.nl/pam-weblogin
token = <replace with SRAM API TOKEN for your service>
retries = 3
attribute = email
cache_duration = 30
verify = /etc/ssl/ca.crt

• url is the pam-weblogin endpoint of the weblogin server
• token is the complete HTTP Authorization header, including Bearer
• retries is the number of verification code retries allowed
• cache_duration is the time the server should respond with a cached answer instead of reauthenticating the user, in seconds
• verify alternative SSL CA, for debug purposes

Locking yourself out

Please make sure to create a way of accessing the machine in case you create a configuration that effectively locks you out of the machine. Practice on a local VM first.

One simple way to do this is to add an extra line to the /etc/pam.d/sshd configuration for your personal uid:

auth sufficient pam_succeed_if.so uid eq 1000 quiet

Standalone server

Whereas this pam module was developed for use with SRAM SBS, it is also possible to integrate it in your own infrastructure. To that end, we provide a fully fuctional pam-weblogin server which can authenticate users by acting as an OIDC RP in an existing infratructure. See the Readme file in server/ for more info.

SSH Session Multiplexing

To prevent having to go through the login sequence every time you access a pam-weblogin enabled server, you can use SSH session multiplexing to reuse an existing ssh session.

Add these lines for the host(s) you want to enable session multiplexing for to your local .ssh/config:

Host ssh-demo.sram.surf.nl
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/demo-%r@%h:%p
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPersist 10m

SSHFS

To prevent having to go through the login sequence every time you access a pam-weblogin enabled server, you can also use SSHFS to create a long standing filesystem mount to the remote server:

$ mkdir my-sshfs
$ sshfs <user>@<server>: my-sshfs
$