The Authen::PAAS distribution provides a Perl API for authenticating and 
authorizing users of computing services. Its design is inspired by 
existing pluggable authentication services such as PAM and Java's JAAS, so 
people familiar with those two services should be comfortable with the 
concepts in Authen::PAAS. At its heart, Authen::PAAS provides a login 
service, with pluggable modules for performing different authentication 
schemes. The pluggable framework enables the system administrator, rather 
than the application developer to define what method is used to 
authentication with a particular application.

One might ask, why not just use PAM directly via the existing Authen::PAM 
Perl bindings. While this works well for applications which wish to 
authenticate against real UNIX user accounts (eg FTP, Telnet, SSH), it is 
not particularly well suited to applications with 'virtualized' user 
accounts. For example, a web application may maintain a set of virtual 
user accounts in a database, or a chat server, may maintain a set of user 
accounts in a text configuration file. Since it merely delegates through 
to the underlying C libraries, the Authen::PAM module does not provide a 
convenient means to write new authentication schemes in Perl. Thus the 
Authen::PAAS distribution provides a pure Perl API for authentication.

WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Authen-PAAS
Author: Daniel Berrange <dan@berrange.com>