Re: pam session

[Pawel Krawczyk <kravietz () aba krakow pl>]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 03:11:02AM +0200, Christian Kraemer wrote:

> This is espacially anoying if you
> use pam_limits.so to set rlimits. Every user could
> cirrcumvent them easily by calling ssh in this way:
> ssh user@server /bin/sh

The same problem was present in SSH 1.2.x some time ago and I've created a
patch to fix it (http://ceti.pl/~kravietz/prog.html).

PAM session start had to be called from two procedures (one for
interactive, one for non-interactive login), and then closed. The latter
required keeping session state in some variable all over the login time
and it created several problems how to do this in a nice and secure way.

In general, using the PAM session management required much more effort
than other authentication methods and it was simply skipped by the
developers. However, I don't remember exact details and many things could
have changed in recent PAM versions.