What is GSSAPI?
GSSAPI is an acronym; it stands for Generic Security Services Application Programming Interface. The GSSAPI is a generic API for doing client-server authentication. The motivation behind it is that every security system has it’s own API, and the effort involved with adding different security systems to applications is extremely difficult with the variance between security APIs. However, with a common API, application vendors could write to the generic API and it could work with any number of security systems. How does this relate to Kerberos? Included with most major Kerberos 5 distributions is a GSSAPI implementation. Thus, if a particular application or protocol says that it supports the GSSAPI, then that means that it supports Kerberos, by virtue of Kerberos including a GSSAPI implementation. The relevant standards for GSSAPI include: • RFC 2743 – Generic Security Services Application Program Interface Version 2, Update 1.
GSSAPI is an acronym; it stands for Generic Security Services Application Programming Interface. The GSSAPI is a generic API for doing client-server authentication. The motivation behind it is that every security system has it’s own API, and the effort involved with adding different security systems to applications is extremely difficult with the variance between security APIs. However, with a common API, application vendors could write to the generic API and it could work with any number of security systems.
