MUNGED(8) MUNGE Uid 'N' Gid Emporium MUNGED(8) NAME munged - MUNGE daemon SYNOPSIS munged [OPTION]... DESCRIPTION The munged daemon is responsible for authenticating local MUNGE clients and servicing their credential encode & decode requests. All munged daemons within a security realm share a common key. All hosts within this realm are expected to have common users/UIDs and groups/GIDs. The key is used to cryptographically protect the credentials; it is created with the mungekey command. When a credential is created, munged embeds metadata within it including the effective UID and GID of the requesting client (as determined by munged) and the current time (as determined by the local clock). It then compresses the data, computes a message authentication code, encrypts the data, and base64-encodes the result before returning the credential to the client. When a credential is validated, munged first checks the message authentica- tion code to ensure the credential has not been subsequently altered. Next, it checks the embedded UID/GID restrictions to determine whether the requesting client is allowed to decode it. Then, it checks the embedded encode time against the current time; if this difference exceeds the embed- ded time-to-live, the credential has expired. Finally, it checks whether this credential has been previously decoded on this host; if so, the cre- dential has been replayed. If all checks pass, the credential metadata and payload are returned to the client. OPTIONS -h, --help Display a summary of the command-line options. -L, --license Display license information. -V, --version Display version information. -f, --force Force the daemon to run if at all possible. This overrides warnings for an existing local domain socket, a lack of entropy for the PRNG, and insecure file/directory permissions. Use with caution as over- riding these warnings can affect security. -F, --foreground Run the daemon in the foreground. -M, --mlockall Lock pages into memory to prevent the daemon from being swapped to disk. This can prevent authentication delays under extreme memory pressure. Requires sufficient memory lock limits. See the MEMORY LOCKING section below. -s, --stop Stop the daemon bound to the socket and wait for it to shut down. Use with the --socket option to target a daemon bound to a non-de- fault socket location. This option exits with a zero status if the specified daemon was successfully stopped, or a non-zero status oth- erwise. -S, --socket path Specify the local domain socket for communicating with clients. -v, --verbose Be verbose. --auth-server-dir directory Specify an alternate directory in which the daemon will create the pipe used to authenticate clients. The recommended permissions for this directory are 0711. This option is only valid on platforms where client authentication is performed via a file-descriptor pass- ing mechanism. --auth-client-dir directory Specify an alternate directory in which clients will create the file used to authenticate themselves to the daemon. The recommended per- missions for this directory are 1733. This option is only valid on platforms where client authentication is performed via a file-de- scriptor passing mechanism. --benchmark Disable recurring timers in order to reduce some noise while bench- marking. This affects the PRNG entropy pool, supplementary group mapping, and credential replay hash. Do not enable this option when running in production. --group-check-mtime boolean Specify whether the modification time of /etc/group should be checked before updating the supplementary group membership mapping. If this value is non-zero, the check will be enabled and the mapping will not be updated unless the file has been modified since the last update. --group-update-time seconds Specify the number of seconds between updates to the supplementary group membership mapping; this mapping is used when restricting cre- dentials by GID. A value of 0 causes it to be computed initially but never updated (unless triggered by a SIGHUP). A value of -1 causes it to be disabled. --key-file path Specify an alternate pathname to the key file. --listen-backlog integer Specify the socket's listen backlog limit; note that the kernel may impose a lower limit. A value of 0 uses the software default. A value of -1 specifies SOMAXCONN, the maximum listen backlog queue length defined in <sys/socket.h>. --log-file path Specify an alternate pathname to the log file. --max-ttl integer Specify the maximum time-to-live (in seconds) for credentials. This value caps the TTL during both encoding and decoding. The hard- coded upper bound is 3600 seconds (1 hour); the default is 3600. Reducing this value will limit the maximum retention time for replay cache entries, which is viable if clocks within the MUNGE realm can be kept in sync with minimal skew. --num-threads integer Specify the number of threads to spawn for processing credential re- quests. --origin address Specify the origin address that will be encoded into credential metadata. This can be a hostname or IPv4 address; it can also be the name of a local network interface, in which case the first IPv4 address found assigned to that interface will be used. The default value is the IPv4 address of the hostname returned by gethostname(). Failure to resolve the address will result in an error; if overrid- den, the origin will be set to the null address. --pid-file path Specify an alternate pathname for storing the Process ID of the dae- mon. --seed-file path Specify an alternate pathname to the PRNG seed file. --syslog Redirect log messages to syslog when the daemon is running in the background. --trusted-group group Specify the group name or GID of the "trusted group". This is used for permission checks on a directory hierarchy. Directories with group write permissions are allowed if they are owned by the trusted group (or the sticky bit is set). MEMORY LOCKING The --mlockall option locks pages into memory to prevent swapping under memory pressure. Memory usage scales with the number of worker threads, size of the user and group databases (when supplementary group mapping is enabled), and the rate of credential decoding (which grows the replay cache). Many systems default to an insufficient memory lock limit. A minimum of 16 MB is required for basic operation; 64-256 MB is recommended for typical configurations. Increase it in one of the following ways: systemd-based systems Create /etc/systemd/system/munge.service.d/memlock.conf: [Service] LimitMEMLOCK=256M Then reload and restart: systemctl daemon-reload systemctl restart munge.service PAM limits Add to /etc/security/limits.conf (values in KB): munge soft memlock 262144 munge hard memlock 262144 On systemd-based systems, PAM limits are ignored for services. Use the systemd configuration instead. Shell environment (for testing) Set the limit before starting munged (value in KB): ulimit -l 262144 munged --mlockall Security Considerations The replay cache is unbounded and grows with credential decode rate. Re- play entries are retained until credentials expire based on their time-to- live (TTL). Credentials have a default TTL of 5 minutes; clients can spec- ify up to the maximum TTL configured on the encoding munged (1 hour by de- fault, configurable via --max-ttl). During decoding, the credential's TTL is capped at the decoding munged's maximum TTL. When --mlockall is speci- fied, replay entries are locked in physical memory. On systems with untrusted local users, an attacker could encode credentials with the maximum TTL (1 hour by default) and decode them repeatedly to fill the replay cache. Once the memory lock limit is reached, munged will likely terminate when attempting to allocate additional memory, causing a denial of service. Use this option only on trusted systems where local users are controlled, or set the memory lock limit to a reasonable upper bound rather than unlim- ited. Monitor munged's locked memory usage on high-volume systems to en- sure the limit is not approached during normal operation. Reducing --max-ttl can limit replay cache growth but requires tight clock synchro- nization. SIGNALS SIGHUP Immediately update the supplementary group membership mapping in- stead of waiting for the next scheduled update; this mapping is used when restricting credentials by GID. SIGTERM Terminate the daemon. NOTES All clocks within a security realm must be kept in sync within the creden- tial time-to-live setting. While munged prevents a given credential from being decoded on a particular host more than once, nothing prevents a credential from being decoded on multiple hosts within the security realm before it expires. AUTHOR Chris Dunlap <cdunlap@llnl.gov> COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 2007-2025 Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. Copyright (C) 2002-2007 The Regents of the University of California. MUNGE is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Additionally for the MUNGE library (libmunge), you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the Li- cense, or (at your option) any later version. SEE ALSO munge(1), remunge(1), unmunge(1), munge(3), munge_ctx(3), munge_enum(3), munge(7), mungekey(8). https://github.com/dun/munge munge-0.5.18 2026-02-10 MUNGED(8)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | MEMORY LOCKING | SIGNALS | NOTES | AUTHOR | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO
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