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Old 12-06-2004, 04:03 PM   #1
jedediah
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Registered: Sep 2004
Location: Oregon
Distribution: Slackware 10
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Command Line Password Check


I have a question for anyone out there who might be familiar with the command line.

I am designing a web application (in PHP) which will get a user's name and password, then change to a new password that the user requests.

However, I've run into a few small snags.

At first, I was going to just attempt to open an ssh session from php using the shell_exec() command (which lets a command line program to be run) and see if the session opens properly. But, as many will be quick to realize, there's no actual way to pass the user's password in a command line statement with ssh.

Then, my next thought was to log in to the local machine through ssh as root, and have a shell script automatically run that would confirm the user really gave me the right password. (I can log into root using a pub/priv key setup) However, I can't seem to find a method for checking whether or not the user gave me the correct password, seems like the applications passwd and chpasswd only let me change the password.

I looked into writing a script that would use "expect", but I don't have access to Tcl on this system, so expect isn't a possibilty.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks a bunch.
 
Old 12-06-2004, 04:39 PM   #2
jailbait
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Registered: Feb 2003
Location: Virginia, USA
Distribution: Debian 12
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"I am designing a web application (in PHP) which will get a user's name and password"

You could make the first command in the script invoke bash as a login shell:

/bin/bash -l -c (rest of script)

That should take care of verifying the old password.

See man bash.

-----------------------
Steve Stites

Last edited by jailbait; 12-06-2004 at 04:47 PM.
 
Old 12-07-2004, 03:13 PM   #3
jedediah
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Registered: Sep 2004
Location: Oregon
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Clarification

Thanks for the help, unfortunately I'm having a little trouble getting bash to amount to anything worthwhile.

I spent some serious time digging through man bash, and I can't seem to find a way to make "-l" accept login information.

Any ideas?

Thanks again

Note: PHP is running as user "nobody", don't think that should make a difference though
 
Old 12-08-2004, 09:43 PM   #4
Krugger
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I was just wandering how a program that is running as nobody is going to read /etc/shadow. It would need to use something like PAM, right? There is a binary that does that. It is somewhere in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin. It's the same route that screensaver take to verify the passwords.
 
Old 12-09-2004, 03:01 PM   #5
jedediah
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Registered: Sep 2004
Location: Oregon
Distribution: Slackware 10
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PAM is a good thought, but I managed to come up with a way for 'nobody' to ssh to localhost through a pub/priv key scheme, then run the chpasswd command from there. It's made so that only the php process can have access to the private key.

Thanks for the help everyone.
 
  


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