how to prohibit user 's operation

Les Mikesell les at futuresource.com
Tue Sep 4 13:01:16 UTC 2007


Ian jonhson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I login a account, for example my_name_1, now I want to change to
> other account, named my_name_2. For example,
> 
> $ whoami
> tom           <--- legal user
> $ su john   <--  illegal operation, should be refused.
> 
> In this case, how to refuse the request by PAM ?
> 
> The user going through this above case can be other persons, PAM
> should be able to determine whether the operation is legal. However,
> it is not easy to accomplish the operation control.
> 
> The user may be a legal user, however his operation to switch account
> have to be prohibited. I used the pam_sm_authenticate to authenticate
> the user is legal. But when I refuse his operation (su, in above
> example) by pam_sm_acct_mgt, it can not get what I want.
> 
> In pam_sm_authenticate, it returns PAM_SUCCESS if user is legal one.
> And, in pam_sm_acct_mgt, I want to return PAM_AUTH_ERR, but the su
> operation is still in function and switch to john.
> 
> What should I do?

Normally the 'auth' entry in /etc/pam.d/su would be something that makes 
you enter the password for the new user unless you are root or a member 
of a trusted group.  Isn't having to know the password enough to control 
the operation?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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