SASLAUTHD(8)                                       BSD System Manager's Manual                                      SASLAUTHD(8)

NAME
     saslauthd -- sasl authentication server

SYNOPSIS
     saslauthd -a authmech [-Tvdchlr] [-O option] [-m mux_path] [-n threads] [-s size] [-t timeout]

DESCRIPTION
     saslauthd is a daemon process that handles plaintext authentication requests on behalf of the SASL library.

     The server fulfills two roles: it isolates all code requiring superuser privileges into a single process, and it can be
     used to provide proxy authentication services to clients that do not understand SASL based authentication.

     saslauthd should be started from the system boot scripts when going to multi-user mode. When running against a protected
     authentication database (e.g. the shadow mechanism), it must be run as the superuser.

   Options
     Options named by lower-case letters configure the server itself.  Upper-case options control the behavior of specific
     authentication mechanisms; their applicability to a particular authentication mechanism is described in the AUTHENTICATION
     MECHANISMS section.

     -a authmech
             Use authmech as the authentication mechanism. (See the AUTHENTICATION MECHANISMS section below.) This parameter is
             mandatory.

     -O option
             A mechanism specific option (e.g. rimap hostname or config file path)

     -H hostname
             The remote host to be contacted by the rimap authentication mechanism. (Depricated, use -O instead)

     -m path
             Use path as the pathname to the named socket to listen on for connection requests. This must be an absolute path-
             name, and MUST NOT include the trailing "/mux".  Note that the default for this value is "/var/state/saslauthd" (or
             what was specified at compile time) and that this directory must exist for saslauthd to function.

     -n threads
             Use threads processes for responding to authentication queries. (default: 5)  A value of zero will indicate that
             saslauthd should fork an individual process for each connection.  This can solve leaks that occur in some deploy-
             ments..

     -s size
             Use size as the table size of the hash table (in kilobytes)

     -t timeout
             Use timeout as the expiration time of the authentication cache (in seconds)

     -T      Honour time-of-day login restrictions.

     -h      Show usage information

     -c      Enable cacheing of authentication credentials

     -l      Disable the use of a lock file for controlling access to accept().

     -r      Combine the realm with the login (with an '@' sign in between).  e.g.  login: "foo" realm: "bar" will get passed as
             login: "foo@bar".  Note that the realm will still be passed, which may lead to unexpected behavior.

     -v      Print the version number and available authentication mechanisms on standard error, then exit.

     -d      Debugging mode.

   Logging
     saslauthd logs it's activities via syslogd using the LOG_AUTH facility.

AUTHENTICATION MECHANISMS
     saslauthd supports one or more "authentication mechanisms", dependent upon the facilities provided by the underlying oper-
     ating system.  The mechanism is selected by the -aho flag from the following list of choices:

     dce        (AIX)

                Authenticate using the DCE authentication environment.

     getpwent   (All platforms)

                Authenticate using the getpwent() library function. Typically this authenticates against the local password
                file. See your systems getpwent(3) man page for details.

     kerberos4  (All platforms)

                Authenticate against the local Kerberos 4 realm. (See the NOTES section for caveats about this driver.)

     kerberos5  (All platforms)

                Authenticate against the local Kerberos 5 realm.

     pam        (Linux, Solaris)

                Authenticate using Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM).

     rimap      (All platforms)

                Forward authentication requests to a remote IMAP server. This driver connects to a remote IMAP server, specified
                using the -O flag, and attempts to login (via an IMAP `LOGIN' command) using the credentials supplied to the
                local server. If the remote authentication succeeds the local connection is also considered to be authenticated.
                The remote connection is closed as soon as the tagged response from the `LOGIN' command is received from the
                remote server.

                The option parameter to the -O flag describes the remote server to forward authentication requests to.  hostname
                can be a hostname (imap.example.com) or a dotted-quad IP address (192.168.0.1). The latter is useful if the
                remote server is multi-homed and has network interfaces that are unreachable from the local IMAP server. The
                remote host is contacted on the `imap' service port. A non-default port can be specified by appending a slash
                and the port name or number to the hostname argument.

                The -O flag and argument are mandatory when using the rimap mechanism.

     shadow     (AIX, Irix, Linux, Solaris)

                Authenticate against the local "shadow password file".  The exact mechanism is system dependent.  saslauthd cur-
                rently understands the getspnam() and getuserpw() library routines. Some systems honour the -T flag.

     sasldb     (All platforms)

                Authenticate against the SASL authentication database.  Note that this is probabally not what you want to be
                using, and is even disabled at compile-time by default.  If you want to use sasldb with the SASL library, you
                probably want to use the pwcheck_method of "auxprop" along with the sasldb auxprop plugin instead.

     ldap       (All platforms that support OpenLDAP 2.0 or higher)

                Authenticate against an ldap server.  The ldap configuration parameters are read from /etc/saslauthd.conf.  The
                location of this file can be changed with the -O parameter. See the LDAP_SASLAUTHD file included with the dis-
                tribution for the list of available parameters.

     sia        (Digital UNIX)

                Authenticate using the Digital UNIX Security Integration Architecture (a.k.a.  "enhanced security").

NOTES
     The kerberos4 authentication driver consumes considerable resources. To perform an authentication it must obtain a ticket
     granting ticket from the TGT server on every authentication request. The Kerberos library routines that obtain the TGT also
     create a local ticket file, on the reasonable assumption that you will want to save the TGT for use by other Kerberos
     applications. These ticket files are unusable by saslauthd , however there is no way not to create them. The overhead of
     creating and removing these ticket files can cause serious performance degradation on busy servers. (Kerberos was never
     intended to be used in this manner, anyway.)

FILES
     /var/run/saslauthd/mux  The default communications socket.

     /etc/saslauthd.conf     The default configuration file for ldap support.

SEE ALSO
     passwd(1), getpwent(3), getspnam(3), getuserpw(3), sasl_checkpass(3) sia_authenticate_user(3),

CMU-SASL                                                   10 24 2002                                                   CMU-SASL