The FTP protocol is old, stemming from the days of Telnet, before security came to be the relevant issue it is today. One of the protocol's biggest flaws, in today's security-conscious world, is the transmission of passwords "in the clear", unencrypted, easily visible to network sniffers. There are several ways of attempting to deal with this flaw.

ProFTPD allows for the definition of "virtual" users: users who do not have accounts on the host machine, whose account information is defined in other sources. The passwords for these users are then specific only to FTP access, and thus do not expose shell access (ssh, hopefully) to unauthorized users. These alternative account information sources include SQL tables (via mod_sql), LDAP servers (via mod_ldap), CDB files (via mod_auth_cdb), and other system files (via the AuthUserFile and AuthGroupFile configuration directives). The proftpd server can be configured to use multiple account information sources simultaneously as well, allowing for flexible support of a range of environments.

This document focuses on the use of the AuthUserFile and AuthGroupFile directives. Several questions often arise about the use of these directives. In general, the answers to those questions apply to other authentication/account sources, too.

Formats
Any configured AuthUserFile is used in addition to /etc/passwd, not instead of it (prior to 1.2.8rc1, however, an AuthUserFile was used instead of /etc/passwd); similarly for AuthGroupFile and /etc/group. The AuthOrder directive can be used if you want proftpd to use only the AuthUserFile. The format of an AuthUserFile is the same as /etc/passwd (man passwd(5)), and the format of an AuthGroupFile is the same as /etc/group (man group(5)). There is an ftpasswd script available that can be used to create and update these files.

It is important to note here that not all flavors of Unix use these formats; one notable exception is FreeBSD. With FreeBSD, user account information is stored in binary database files as opposed to ASCII files. The C library on this platform also lacks the functions necessary for making the AuthUserFile and AuthGroupFile directives work properly. In this case, proftpd uses an internal implementation of the missing functions to read AuthUserFiles and AuthGroupFiles. This internal implementation requires that AuthUserFiles have the traditional passwd(5) format:

  username:password:uid:gid:gecos:homedir:shell

  groupname:grouppasswd:gid:member1,member2,...memberN

Choice of IDs
The choice of IDs for your users is important; the operating system does not deal with user processes in terms of their user names, it knows only of the numeric identity of a process. In general, it is best if each user has a unique positive user ID (negative IDs are an ugly hack, and proftpd will complain if they are used).

However, in some mass-hosting environments such as ISPs, the number of users is greater than the number of IDs available. In these cases, you can give each user the same ID; additional steps should then be taken to make sure that each user is isolated from affecting other users' files. These additional steps are to make sure each user has a unique home directory, and then to restrict each user to their respective home directories by having

  DefaultRoot ~

Shadow passwords
There really is no need for an AuthShadowFile directive. The purpose of a shadow file is separate sensitive information (e.g. passwords) from other account information (username/UID/GID, etc). Programs like /bin/ls often reference the passwd file in order to display user/group names rather than numbers; these programs do not really need that sensitive information. Rather than relying on programs like /bin/ls to ignore the sensitive information, libraries were developed to split the information into /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow (and similarly for /etc/group, but very few administrators use group passwords anymore). Some operating systems, most notably FreeBSD, though, chose a different form of information separation. Since FreeBSD maintains account information in binary database files, the shadow libraries mentioned above are not used. Instead, FreeBSD returns the sensitive information to the calling program only if it has sufficient (i.e. superuser) privileges.

When proftpd uses an AuthUserFile, it is looking for all of the account information, including the password. And since AuthUserFiles are specific to proftpd, there is no need to split any passwords out of an AuthUserFile into an AuthShadowFile. As the documentation states, an AuthUserFile need not reside inside a chroot() filesystem, which means that users can be effectively isolated from having access to that AuthUserFile. At that point, the only consideration is making sure that the permissions on the AuthUserFile are sufficient for the server to have access, but no other users.

Permissions
As the AuthUserFile and AuthGroupFile files are meant to be drop-in replacements for their system cousins, there are a few caveats. /etc/passwd and /etc/group are normally world-readable on modern Unix systems. This allows programs like /bin/ls to map system ID numbers to more legible names; sensitive information in the /etc/passwd and /etc/group is normally stored elsewhere, in restricted shadow files. The proftpd server thus assumes that it will not need special privileges to read an AuthUserFile or an AuthGroupFile. The process will access any AuthUserFiles and AuthGroupFiles with the credentials of the user and group configured via the User and Group directives. The files may contain sensitive information, so they should not have as open of permissions as /etc/passwd and /etc/group. The most paranoid setting will have user-read-only permissions for those files, and have the files be owned by the user configured for the relevant server via the User directive. Hopefully the server administrator has created a new account on the system just for the ftpd daemon.

ID-to-name mapping
A consequence of which to be aware when using an AuthUserFile is the difference between that AuthUserFile's mapping of system IDs to names, and the mapping in /etc/passwd. This may catch some system administrators unawares when they go to check the ownership of files uploaded by some user whose account is defined in an AuthUserFile, and find those files being reported as being owned by different users and/or groups by /bin/ls. Keep in mind that /bin/ls is using /etc/passwd, not the AuthUserFile. This issue crops up with any alternative account information source, not just AuthUserFiles.

If you are using the same UID/GID for your users, e.g. in a mass hosting environment, one trick you might like to do is make all of the files, as listed by the server, appear to be owned by the logged in user. This is done using the DirFakeUser and DirFakeGroup directives, like this:

  # make listed files appear to be owned by the logged-in user
  DirFakeUser on ~
  DirFakeGroup on ~