Identification and authentication facility

The Identification and Authentication Facility (IAF) is a framework for doing identification and authentication that separates the mechanisms, or schemes, from the clients and services being protected. The IAF consists of:

• A number of schemes:

  • login

  • in.login

  • cr1

• A means of invoking them with standardized input and output, namely the invoke(S) function

• a means of passing information among cooperating components, namely the iaf STREAMS module, and the following attribute-value manipulation functions:

  • getava(S)

  • putava

  • retava

  • setava
  and a means of performing standard operations with the information, namely:

  • the set_id(S) function to set the user's uid

  • the set_env(S) function to set the user's environment

  • shserv(ADM) command to start the user's login shell

This mechanism is employed by the Connection Server and by SAF port monitors to authenticate clients to services (and vice versa, in the case of the cr1 scheme). However, applications may also call the invoke(S) function to perform authentication using cr1 and other schemes, and they may set and retrieve information with the attribute-value manipulation functions.

These interfaces are found in libiaf.so.