SASL provides developers of applications and shared libraries
with mechanisms for authentication, data integrity-checking, and
encryption. SASL enables the developer to code to a generic API.
This approach avoids dependencies on specific mechanisms. SASL
is particularly appropriate for applications that use the IMAP,
SMTP, ACAP, and LDAP protocols, as these protocols all support
SASL. SASL is described in RFC 2222. The SASL library is called
libsasl. libsasl is a framework that allows properly written
SASL consumer applications to use any SASL plug-ins that are
available on the system. The term plug-in refers to objects that
provide services for SASL. Plug-ins are external to libsasl.
SASL plug-ins can be used for authentication and security,
canonicalization of names, and lookup of auxiliary properties,
such as passwords. Cryptographic algorithms are stored in plug-
ins rather than in libsasl. libsasl provides an application
programming interface (API) for consumer applications and
libraries. A service provid