Name Types

Besides QOPs and security mechanisms, OIDs are also used to indicate name types, which indicate the format for an associated name. For example, the function gss_import_name(), which converts the name of a principal from a string to a gss_name_t type, takes as one argument the format of the string to be converted. If the name type is (for example) GSS_C_NT_HOSTBASED_SERVICE, then the function knows that the name being input is of the form “service@host”, as in “nfs@swim2birds”; if it's equal to, for instance, GSS_C_NT_EXPORT_NAME, then the function knows that it's a GSS-API exported name. Applications can find out which name types are available for a given mechanism with the gss_inquire_names_for_mech() function. A list of name types used by the GSS-API is given in Name Types.