Application Portability With GSS-API

GSS-API provides several types of portability for applications:

• Mechanism independence. GSS-API provides a generic interface for security. By specifying a default security mechanism, an application does not need to know the mechanism to be applied nor any details about that mechanism.

• Protocol independence. GSS–API is independent of any communications protocol or protocol suite. For example, GSS–API can be used with applications that use sockets, RCP, or TCP/IP.

  RPCSEC_GSS is an additional layer that smoothly integrates GSS-API with RPC. For more information, see Remote Procedure Calls With GSS-API.

• Platform independence. GSS-API is independent of the type of operating system on which an application is running.

• Quality of Protection independence. Quality of Protection (QOP) refers to the type of algorithm for encrypting data or generating cryptographic tags. GSS-API allows a programmer to ignore QOP by using a default that is provided by GSS-API. On the other hand, an application can specify the QOP if necessary.