SASL: IETF Documents

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SASL RFCs

RFC 2222, Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL)

This document describes a method for adding authentication support to connection-based protocols. To use this specification, a protocol includes a command for identifying and authenticating a user to a server and for optionally negotiating protection of subsequent protocol interactions. If its use is negotiated, a security layer is inserted between the protocol and the connection. This document describes how a protocol specifies such a command, defines several mechanisms for use by the command, and defines the protocol used for carrying a negotiated security layer over the connection.

RFC 2444, The One-Time-Password SASL Mechanism

OTP [OTP] provides a useful authentication mechanism for situations where there is limited client or server trust. Currently, OTP is added to protocols in an ad-hoc fashion with heuristic parsing. This specification defines an OTP SASL [SASL] mechanism so it can be easily and formally integrated into many application protocols.

RFC 2245, Anonymous SASL Mechanism

It is common practice on the Internet to permit anonymous access to various services. Traditionally, this has been done with a plain text password mechanism using "anonymous" as the user name and optional trace information, such as an email address, as the password. As plaintext login commands are not permitted in new IETF protocols, a new way to provide anonymous login is needed within the context of the SASL [SASL] framework.

RFC 2831, Using Digest Authentication as a SASL Mechanism

This specification defines how HTTP Digest Authentication [Digest] can be used as a SASL [RFC 2222] mechanism for any protocol that has a SASL profile. It is intended both as an improvement over CRAM-MD5 [RFC2195] and as a convenient way to support a single authentication mechanism for web, mail, LDAP, and other protocols.

RFC 1321, The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm

This document describes the MD5 message-digest algorithm. The algorithm takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest" of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

The MD5 algorithm is designed to be quite fast on 32-bit machines. In addition, the MD5 algorithm does not require any large substitution tables; the algorithm can be coded quite compactly.

RFC 2104, HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication

This document describes HMAC, a mechanism for message authentication using cryptographic hash functions. HMAC can be used with any iterative cryptographic hash function, e.g., MD5, SHA-1, in combination with a secret shared key. The cryptographic strength of HMAC depends on the properties of the underlying hash function.

As internet drafts expire on a regular basis, please check with the IETF for current documents.