PAP, which is offered by many Internet Service Providers, works basically the same way as the normal login procedure. The client authenticates itself by sending a username and a (optionally encrypted) password to the server, which the server compares to its secrets database.^[55] This technique is vulnerable to eavesdroppers, who may try to obtain the password by listening in on the serial line, and to repeated trial and error attacks.

CHAP does not have these deficiencies. With CHAP, the server sends a randomly generated “challenge” string to the client, along with its hostname. The client uses the hostname to look up the appropriate secret, combines it with the challenge, and encrypts the string using a one-way hashing function. The result is returned to the server along with the client’s hostname. The server now performs the same computation, and acknowledges the client if it arrives at the same result.

CHAP also doesn’t require the client to authenticate itself only at startup time, but sends challenges at regular intervals to make sure the client hasn’t been replaced by an intruder, for instance by switching phone lines, or because of a modem configuration error that causes the PPP daemon not to notice that the original phone call has dropped out and someone else has dialed in.

pppd keeps the secret keys for PAP and CHAP in two separate files called /etc/ppp/pap-secrets and /etc/ppp/chap-secrets. By entering a remote host in one or the other file, you have fine control over whether PAP or CHAP is used to authenticate yourself with your peer, and vice versa.

By default, pppd doesn’t require authentication from the remote host, but it will agree to authenticate itself when requested by the remote host. Since CHAP is so much stronger than PAP, pppd tries to use the former whenever possible. If the peer does not support it, or if pppd can’t find a CHAP secret for the remote system in its chap-secrets file, it reverts to PAP. If it doesn’t have a PAP secret for its peer either, it refuses to authenticate altogether. As a consequence, the connection is shut down.

You can modify this behavior in several ways. When given the auth keyword, pppd requires the peer to authenticate itself. pppd agrees to use either CHAP or PAP as long as it has a secret for the peer in its CHAP or PAP database. There are other options to turn a particular authentication protocol on or off, but I won’t describe them here.

If all systems you talk to with PPP agree to authenticate themselves with you, you should put the auth option in the global /etc/ppp/options file and define passwords for each system in the chap-secrets file. If a system doesn’t support CHAP, add an entry for it to the pap-secrets file. That way, you can make sure no unauthenticated system connects to your host.

The next two sections discuss the two PPP secrets files, pap-secrets and chap-secrets. They are located in /etc/ppp and contain triplets of clients, servers, and passwords, optionally followed by a list of IP addresses. The interpretation of the client and server fields is different for CHAP and PAP, and also depends on whether we authenticate ourselves with the peer, or whether we require the server to authenticate itself with us.

When it has to authenticate itself with a server using CHAP, pppd searches the chap-secrets file for an entry with the client field equal to the local hostname, and the server field equal to the remote hostname sent in the CHAP challenge. When requiring the peer to authenticate itself, the roles are simply reversed: pppd then looks for an entry with the client field equal to the remote hostname (sent in the client’s CHAP response), and the server field equal to the local hostname.

The following is a sample chap-secrets file for vlager:^[56]

# CHAP secrets for vlager.vbrew.com
#
# client         server           secret                addrs
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
vlager.vbrew.com  c3po.lucas.com   "Use The Source Luke" vlager.vbrew.com
c3po.lucas.com    vlager.vbrew.com "arttoo! arttoo!"     c3po.lucas.com
*                 vlager.vbrew.com "TuXdrinksVicBitter"  pub.vbrew.com

When vlager establishes a PPP connection with c3po, c3po asks vlager to authenticate itself by sending a CHAP challenge. pppd on vlager then scans chap-secrets for an entry with the client field equal to vlager.vbrew.com and the server field equal to c3po.lucas.com, and finds the first line shown in the example.^[57] It then produces the CHAP response from the challenge string and the secret (Use The Source Luke), and sends it off to c3po.

pppd also composes a CHAP challenge for c3po containing a unique challenge string and its fully qualified hostname, vlager.vbrew.com. c3po constructs a CHAP response in the way we discussed, and returns it to vlager. pppd then extracts the client hostname (c3po.vbrew.com) from the response and searches the chap-secrets file for a line matching c3po as a client and vlager as the server. The second line does this, so pppd combines the CHAP challenge and the secret arttoo! arttoo!, encrypts them, and compares the result to c3po’s CHAP response.

The optional fourth field lists the IP addresses that are acceptable for the client named in the first field. The addresses can be given in dotted quad notation or as hostnames that are looked up with the resolver. For instance, if c3po asks to use an IP address during IPCP negotiation that is not in this list, the request is rejected, and IPCP is shut down. In the sample file shown above, c3po is therefore limited to using its own IP address. If the address field is empty, any addresses are allowed; a value of "-" prevents the use of IP with that client altogether.

The third line of the sample chap-secrets file allows any host to establish a PPP link with vlager because a client or server field of * is a wildcard matching any hostname. The only requirements are that the connecting host must know the secret and that it must use the IP address associated with pub.vbrew.com. Entries with wildcard hostnames may appear anywhere in the secrets file, since pppd will always use the best match it can find for the server/client pair.

pppd may need some help forming hostnames. As explained before, the remote hostname is always provided by the peer in the CHAP challenge or response packet. The local hostname is obtained by calling the gethostname(2) function by default. If you have set the system name to your unqualified hostname, you also have to provide pppd with the domain name using the domain option:

# pppd ... domain vbrew.com

This provision appends the Brewery’s domain name to vlager for all authentication related activities. Other options that modify pppd’s idea of the local hostname are usehostname and name. When you give the local IP address on the command line using local:remote and local as a name instead of a dotted quad, pppd uses this as the local hostname.

The PAP secrets file is very similar to CHAP’s. The first two fields always contain a username and a server name; the third holds the PAP secret. When the remote host sends its authentication information, pppd uses the entry that has a server field equal to the local hostname, and a user field equal to the username sent in the request. When it is necessary for us to send our credentials to the peer, pppd uses the secret that has a user field equal to the local username and the server field equal to the remote hostname.

A sample PAP secrets file might look like this:

# /etc/ppp/pap-secrets
#
# user          server          secret          addrs
vlager-pap      c3po            cresspahl       vlager.vbrew.com
c3po            vlager          DonaldGNUth     c3po.lucas.com

The first line is used to authenticate ourselves when talking to c3po. The second line describes how a user named c3po has to authenticate itself with us.

The name vlager-pap in the first column is the username we send to c3po. By default, pppd picks the local hostname as the username, but you can also specify a different name by giving the user option followed by that name.

When picking an entry from the pap-secrets file to identify us to a remote host, pppd must know the remote host’s name. As it has no way of finding that out, you must specify it on the command line using the remotename keyword followed by the peer’s hostname. To use the above entry for authentication with c3po, for example, we must add the following option to pppd’s command line:

# pppd ... remotename c3po user vlager-pap

In the fourth field of the PAP secrets file (and all following fields), you can specify what IP addresses are allowed for that particular host, just as in the CHAP secrets file. The peer will be allowed to request only addresses from that list. In the sample file, the entry that c3po will use when it dials in—the line where c3po is the client—allows it to use its real IP address and no other.

Note that PAP is a rather weak authentication method, you should use CHAP instead whenever possible. We will therefore not cover PAP in greater detail here; if you are interested in using it, you will find more PAP features in the pppd(8) manual page.