Application Portability

As mentioned above, the GSS-API provides several types of portability for applications:

• Mechanism independence. GSS-API provides a generic interface to the mechanisms for which it has been implemented. By specifying a default security mechanism, an application does not need to know which mechanism it is using (for example, Kerberos v5), or even what type of mechanism it uses. As an example, when an application forwards a user's credential to a server, it does not need to know if that credential has a Kerberos format or the format used by some other mechanism, nor how the credentials are stored by the mechanism and accessed by the application. (If necessary, an application can specify a particular mechanism to use.)

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

  RPCSEC_GSS is an additional layer that smoothly integrates GSS-API with RPC. For more information, see RPCSEC_GSS Layer.

• Platform independence. The GSS-API is completely oblivious to the type of operating system on which an application is running.

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