1 The Authen::PAAS distribution provides a Perl API for authenticating and
2 authorizing users of computing services. Its design is inspired by
3 existing pluggable authentication services such as PAM and Java's JAAS, so
4 people familiar with those two services should be comfortable with the
5 concepts in Authen::PAAS. At its heart, Authen::PAAS provides a login
6 service, with pluggable modules for performing different authentication
7 schemes. The pluggable framework enables the system administrator, rather
8 than the application developer to define what method is used to
9 authentication with a particular application.
11 One might ask, why not just use PAM directly via the existing Authen::PAM
12 Perl bindings. While this works well for applications which wish to
13 authenticate against real UNIX user accounts (eg FTP, Telnet, SSH), it is
14 not particularly well suited to applications with 'virtualized' user
15 accounts. For example, a web application may maintain a set of virtual
16 user accounts in a database, or a chat server, may maintain a set of user
17 accounts in a text configuration file. Since it merely delegates through
18 to the underlying C libraries, the Authen::PAM module does not provide a
19 convenient means to write new authentication schemes in Perl. Thus the
20 Authen::PAAS distribution provides a pure Perl API for authentication.
22 WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Authen-PAAS/