pam_tty_audit(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | MODULE TYPES PROVIDED | RETURN VALUES | NOTES | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON

PAM_TTY_AUDIT(8)            Linux-PAM Manual            PAM_TTY_AUDIT(8)

NAME         top

       pam_tty_audit - Enable or disable TTY auditing for specified
       users

SYNOPSIS         top


       pam_tty_audit.so [disable=patterns] [enable=patterns]

DESCRIPTION         top

       The pam_tty_audit PAM module is used to enable or disable TTY
       auditing. By default, the kernel does not audit input on any TTY.

OPTIONS         top

       disable=patterns
           For each user matching patterns, disable TTY auditing. This
           overrides any previous enable option matching the same user
           name on the command line. See NOTES for further description
           of patterns.

       enable=patterns
           For each user matching patterns, enable TTY auditing. This
           overrides any previous disable option matching the same user
           name on the command line. See NOTES for further description
           of patterns.

       open_only
           Set the TTY audit flag when opening the session, but do not
           restore it when closing the session. Using this option is
           necessary for some services that don't fork() to run the
           authenticated session, such as sudo.

       log_passwd
           Log keystrokes when ECHO mode is off but ICANON mode is
           active. This is the mode in which the tty is placed during
           password entry. By default, passwords are not logged. This
           option may not be available on older kernels (3.9?).

MODULE TYPES PROVIDED         top

       Only the session type is supported.

RETURN VALUES         top

       PAM_SESSION_ERR
           Error reading or modifying the TTY audit flag. See the system
           log for more details.

       PAM_SUCCESS
           Success.

NOTES         top

       When TTY auditing is enabled, it is inherited by all processes
       started by that user. In particular, daemons restarted by a user
       will still have TTY auditing enabled, and audit TTY input even by
       other users unless auditing for these users is explicitly
       disabled. Therefore, it is recommended to use disable=* as the
       first option for most daemons using PAM.

       To view the data that was logged by the kernel to audit use the
       command aureport --tty.

       The patterns are comma separated lists of glob patterns or ranges
       of uids. A range is specified as min_uid:max_uid where one of
       these values can be empty. If min_uid is empty only user with the
       uid max_uid will be matched. If max_uid is empty users with the
       uid greater than or equal to min_uid will be matched.

       Please note that passwords in some circumstances may be logged by
       TTY auditing even if the log_passwd is not used. For example, all
       input to an ssh session will be logged - even if there is a
       password being typed into some software running at the remote
       host because only the local TTY state affects the local TTY
       auditing.

EXAMPLES         top

       Audit all administrative actions.

           session   required pam_tty_audit.so disable=* enable=root

SEE ALSO         top

       aureport(8), pam.conf(5), pam.d(5), pam(8)

AUTHOR         top

       pam_tty_audit was written by Miloslav Trmač <mitr@redhat.com>.
       The log_passwd option was added by Richard Guy Briggs
       <rgb@redhat.com>.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the linux-pam (Pluggable Authentication
       Modules for Linux) project.  Information about the project can be
       found at ⟨http://www.linux-pam.org/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see ⟨//www.linux-pam.org/⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2023-12-18.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Linux-PAM Manual               12/22/2023               PAM_TTY_AUDIT(8)