mit-athena / libpam-mktemp Goto Github PK

This is the README for pam_mktemp, a PAM SESSION module which will
securely create a temporary file (ands set an environment variable to
point to it) in pam_open_session, and unlinks the file in
pam_close_session.

This is useful for applications like setting XAUTHORITY to a secure
temporary file in an environment where home directories are in a
network filesystem.  You would do this adding:

session    optional   pam_mktemp.so var=XAUTHORITY prefix=/tmp/xauth

to /etc/pam.d/common-session.

You must specify the var option; the prefix option defaults to
/tmp/tempfile if not specified.  The argument passed to mkstemp when
creating this file will be /tmp/xauth-UID-XXXXXX, where UID is the
user id for the session being opened.

It supports two additional options: debug (enabling debugging output)
and an dir (which causes pam_mktemp to create a temporary directory,
rather than a temporary file).  So, the pam_mktemp line session line
to create a login session temporary directory might look like:

session    optional   pam_mktemp.so debug dir prefix=/var/tmp var=SESSION_TEMPDIR