Chapter 1 C H A P T E R O N E Linux Authentication Hacks 1–9 Security is a primary concern of any sysadmin, especially in today’s com- pletely connected network environments. After locking down networks and systems to minimize the number of opportunities intruders have to access your machines (as discussed elsewhere in this book), providing secure mech- anisms to enable users to log in on your machines is critical to their secu- rity. Let’s face it—by design, anyone with physical or network access to a login prompt on one of your machines usually has a few chances to try to crack someone’s login and password in order to gain access. Many organizations try to secure logins simply by assigning passwords that look like line noise or TECO commands. Unfortunately, this strategy addresses only one aspect of authentication and has the nasty side effect of causing most people to
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