Red Hat Security: Linux in Physical, Virtual, and Cloud

The Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) system provides a generic way for applications to implement common support for authentication and authorization.

A PAM-enabled application invokes the rules in each management group (auth, account, password, and session) at different times during the user authentication and authorization process.

The authselect command is the recommended method for updating PAM configuration.

You can select a security profile from the authselect security profiles.

Each authselect security profile has a number of optional features, which offer additional configuration options.

The pam_pwquality module uses the /etc/security/pwquality.conf configuration file to enforce your organization's password complexity requirements.

The pam_faillock module uses the /etc/security/faillock.conf configuration file to lock accounts after a number of failed authentication attempts within a period of time.