Okay, I added that variable as third parameter to the pam function in Exim and modified my PAM module so that it tries a second conversation to fetch that rhost value. It's a special case for Exim only. Now the logs are complete and the attacker's IP address is available to log consumers like firewall tools.

It seems like Exim wants to provide two conversation answers but the PAM module only required one. So whatever is provided as the first conversation answer seems to be taken as the user name implicitly by PAM. I cannot explain the observed behaviour otherwise.

Besides these conversation answers, there must also exist special well-known items, like the rhost. Dovecot sets them like this, Exim could very likely just do the same, but simply doesn't. Again, someone with more experience in PAM would be a better advisor here. These are just my limited observations.

-Yves


-------- Ursprüngliche Nachricht --------
Von: Jeremy Harris via Exim-users <[email protected]>
Gesendet: Freitag, 8. Januar 2021, 00:15 MEZ
Betreff: [exim] Set rhost for PAM authentication

On 07/01/2021 22:50, Yves Goergen via Exim-users wrote:
To be honest, I have no idea how PAM communicates internally. This code is largely based on another module that comes with Linux and does something similar, pam_userdb.c.

I see "exim" as the service name. I don't know what the remote_user field is and don't regard it. Dovecot sends the IP address string as remote host

So, you'll want to use the exim variable $sender_host_address for
an element in your list of fields.


From what I've read, I believed that these fields are more or less defined in PAM, just like the return codes and stuff. Let's see... Here's the code of dovecot:

https://github.com/dovecot/core/blob/master/src/auth/passdb-pam.c

It contains the PAM_RHOST constant. Looks like PAM knows what that field means. And there is a pam_set_item function that looks like it should be called by the application. What happens if I just add more values to the Exim pam function?

This looks like the corresponding Exim code:

https://github.com/Exim/exim/blob/master/src/src/auths/call_pam.c

The pam library calls back to exim, calling our pam_converse() routine.
Exim supplies as many fields as it asks for, each time it is called -
without knowing what they might be used for.  Exim gets fields to
supply by walking the list that your config-file use of the "pam"
expansion condition supplied.



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