What Is PAM?

PAM is a standard to allow separating network servers from the method used to authenticate users and grant them access to these servers.

PAM is defined in RFC 0.86, and was first defined by programmers from Sun, and implemented in Solaris (v2.5).

Linux-PAM is an implementation of PAM for Linux systems. It exists in current distributions, and the basic servers (telnetd, ftpd, rlogind, passwd, xdm) have been modified to use PAM.