P5-authen-paas

Perl Authentication & Authorization Service

The AuthenPAAS distribution provides a Perl API for authenticating and authorizing users of computing services. Its design is inspired by existing pluggable authentication services such as PAM and Java’s JAAS, so people familiar with those two services should be comfortable with the concepts in AuthenPAAS. At its heart, AuthenPAAS provides a login service, with pluggable modules for performing different authentication schemes. The pluggable framework enables the system administrator, rather than the application developer to define what method is used to authentication with a particular application.

One might ask, why not just use PAM directly via the existing AuthenPAM Perl bindings. While this works well for applications which wish to authenticate against real UNIX user accounts eg FTP, Telnet, SSH, it is not particularly well suited to applications with ‘virtualized’ user accounts. For example, a web application may maintain a set of virtual user accounts in a database, or a chat server, may maintain a set of user accounts in a text configuration file. Since it merely delegates through to the underlying C libraries, the AuthenPAM module does not provide a convenient means to write new authentication schemes in Perl. Thus the AuthenPAAS distribution provides a pure Perl API for authentication.