OATH Toolkit provide components to build one-time password authentication systems. It contains shared C libraries, command line tools and a PAM module. Supported technologies include the event-based HOTP algorithm (RFC 4226), the time-based TOTP algorithm (RFC 6238), and Portable Symmetric Key Container (PSKC, RFC 6030) to manage secret key data. OATH stands for Open AuTHentication, which is the organization that specify the algorithms.
The following components are included:
liboath: A shared and static C library for OATH handling.oathtool: A command line tool for generating and validating OTPs.pam_oath: A PAM module for pluggable login authentication for OATH.libpskc: A shared and static C library for PSKC handling.pskctool: A command line tool for manipulating PSKC data.
For updates on the project please visit our web sites:
OATH Toolkit is licensed under the GPLv3+ license, see the file COPYING.
Liboath and libpskc are available under the LGPLv2.1+, see COPYING.LESSERv2, although you may use them under the GPLv3+ license if you prefer.
Many files in the official release tarball are automatically generated by various tools, for example Makefile.in by automake and documentation by GTK-DOC. For authoritative licensing information, refer to information in each file.
For any copyright year range specified as YYYY-ZZZZ in this package note that the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.
The file INSTALL contains generic installation and configuration instructions, however briefly the typical process is:
./configure
make check install
If any of the self-tests fail, please report it as a bug.
For e-mail discussions related the OATH Toolkit, please send e-mail to oath-toolkit-help@nongnu.org after subscribing to the mailing list, where you can find an archive of earlier posts.
To report a problem please open an issue on the OATH Toolkit issue tracker: https://codeberg.org/oath-toolkit/oath-toolkit/issues
To build from version controlled sources, and other information for developers, read the file CONTRIBUTING.md.
Copyright (C) 2009-2026 Simon Josefsson
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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
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WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
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