checkpassword - check a password

checkpassword prog

checkpassword reads descriptor 3 through end of file and then closes descriptor 3. There must be at most 512 bytes of data before end of file.

The information supplied on descriptor 3 is a login name terminated by \0, a password terminated by \0, a timestamp terminated by \0, and possibly more data. There are no other restrictions on the form of the login name, password, and timestamp.

If the password is unacceptable, checkpassword exits 1. If checkpassword is misused, it may instead exit 2. If there is a temporary problem checking the password, checkpassword exits 111.

If the password is acceptable, checkpassword runs prog. prog consists of one or more arguments.

There are other tools that offer the same interface as checkpassword. Applications that use checkpassword are encouraged to take the checkpassword name as an argument, so that they can be used with different tools.

Note that these tools do not follow the getopt(3) interface. Optional features are controlled through (1) the tool name and (2) environment variables.

checkpassword checks the login name and password against /etc/passwd, using the operating system's getpwnam(3) and crypt(3) functions, supplemented by getspnam. It rejects accounts with empty passwords. It ignores the timestamp.

Other checkpassword-compatible tools have different interpretations of login names, passwords, and timestamps. Both the login name and the password should be treated as secrets by the application calling checkpassword; the only distinction is for administrative convenience. The timestamp should include any other information that the password is based on; for example, the challenge in a challenge-response system such as APOP.

WARNING: getpwnam is inherently unreliable. It fails to distinguish between temporary errors and nonexistent users. Future versions of getpwnam(3) should return ETXTBSY to indicate temporary errors and ESRCH to indicate nonexistent users.

Before invoking prog, checkpassword sets up $USER, $HOME, $SHELL, its supplementary groups, its gid, its uid, and its working directory.

Other checkpassword-compatible tools may make different changes to the process state. It is crucial for these effects to be documented; different applications have different requirements.

getpwnam(3), crypt(3)