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# Quickstart guide

This document offers a general overview of the Cyrus SASL library. The Cyrus SASL Libray provides applications with an implementation of the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (RFC2222), and several authentication mechanisms. Users interested in the “big picture” of what is provided by the library should read about Cyrus SASL Components.

## Features

The following Authentication Mechanisms are included in this distribution:

- ANONYMOUS

- CRAM-MD5

- DIGEST-MD5

- EXTERNAL

- GSSAPI (MIT Kerberos 5, Heimdal Kerberos 5 or CyberSafe)

- KERBEROS_V4

- LOGIN

- NTLM (requires OpenSSL libcrypto)

- OTP (requires OpenSSL libcrypto)

- PLAIN

- SRP (work in progress; requires OpenSSL libcrypto)

The library also supports storing user secrets in either a hash database (e.g. Berkeley DB, gdbm, ndbm), LDAP, or in a SQL database (MySQL, Postgres).

Additionally, mechanisms such as PLAIN and LOGIN (where the plaintext password is directly supplied by the client) can perform direct password verification via the saslauthd daemon. This allows the use of LDAP, PAM, and a variety of other password verification routines.

The sample directory in the code contains two programs which provide a reference for using the library, as well as making it easy to test a mechanism on the command line. See <a href=”programming.html”>programming.html</a> for more information.

This library is believed to be thread safe if:

- you supply mutex functions (see sasl_set_mutex())

- you make no libsasl calls until sasl_client/server_init() completes

- no libsasl calls are made after sasl_done() is begun

- when using GSSAPI, you use a thread-safe GSS / Kerberos 5 library.

## Typical Installation

If you are upgrading from Cyrus SASLv1, please see upgrade guide.

Please see the installation guide for instructions on how to install this package.

Note that the library can use the environment variable SASL_PATH to locate the directory where the mechanisms are; this should be a colon-separated list of directories containing plugins. Otherwise it will default to the value of `--with-plugindir` as supplied to `configure` (which itself defaults to `/usr/local/lib`).

Looking to Install on Mac OSX?

Looking to Install on Windows?

## Configuration

There are two main ways to configure the SASL library for a given application. The first (and typically easiest) is to make use of the application’s configuration files. Provided the application supports it (via the `SASL_CB_GETOPT` callback), please refer to that documetation for how to supply <a href=options.html>SASL options</a>.

Alternatively, Cyrus SASL looks for configuration files in /usr/lib/sasl/Appname.conf where Appname is settable by the application (for example, Sendmail 8.10 and later set this to “Sendmail”).

Configuration using the application’s configuration files (via the `getopt` callback) will override those supplied by the SASL configuration files.

For a detailed guide on configuring libsasl, please look at the Sysadmin guide and the information on options.