authbind software allows a program that would normally require superuser privileges to access privileged network services to run as a non-privileged user.
authbind allows the system administrator to permit specific users and groups access to bind to TCP and UDP ports below 1024. Ports 0 - 1023 are normally privileged and reserved for programs that are run as the root user. Allowing regular users limited access to privileged ports helps prevent possible privilege escalation and system compromise if the software happens to contain software bugs or is found to be vulnerable to unknown exploits.
- authbind achieves this by defining the LD_PRELOAD environment variable.
authbind is currently distributed with the Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions
