I was gonna say well, of course you should be able to configure it within PAM to only be used for certain authentication types, but it turns out one of the lite

I was gonna say well, of course you should be able to configure it within PAM to only be used for certain authentication types, but it turns out one of the literally five pages in the wiki covers just that: https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy/wiki/Only-using-howdy-for-specific-authentication-types https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy/wiki/Only-using-howdy-for-... And for anything PAM doesn't handle, since Howdy is just a Python lib/app, it's almost trivial to modify it to do anything else. You could just add your modifications into https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy/blob/beta/howdy/src/compare.py https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy/blob/beta/howdy/src/compar... (eg, make it autofail if a env/memory flag hasn't been set after first login, same with storing an inactivity flag, etc. Looks like the author is responsive taking pull requests, so you could even do it properly and get it upstreamed even: https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclose... As for appropriateness, it's fine if it's not your cup of tea, but with 3.6K stars and 220 forks, obviously it works great/is useful for a lot of people so I'm glad that the author released and maintains it, even if it's not for everyone.