JAAS login module using PAM

I recently had a look into JAAS for a customer project. The API is not 100% straightforward due to its design goal of hiding implementation specifics but I guess that’s the price you have to pay when specifying a generic API.

The JAAS guide talks about JAAS’s similarity to PAM. This lead me to think that there should be a default implementation of a bridge between JAAS and PAM out there. Well there is the jaas-pam project on Sourceforge but the project’s code hasn’t been updated in years and on top of that the project uses JNI.

Then I stumbled over Leonid Dubinsky’s blog which suggests using libpam4j to implement a LoginModule for PAM. Now that sounds like some interesting project to get my feet wet with JAAS!

It only took me an hour or so to come up with a LoginModule implementation using libpam4j. I put the code up on github in case I need it later.