Surviving Cyrus SASL
Tutorial with Patrick Koetter and Ralf Hildebrandt
The Cyrus SASL authenticaton framework plays an important role in client-server infrastructures. Radius-servers, MTAs, LDAP-servers and numerous other applications use Cyrus SASL to handle authentication requests by clients in order to authorize the clients to take a server-action e.g. permission to relay a message or select protected entries from a LDAP-tree.
Unfortunately there's no (usable) user manual that tells operators how to setup Cyrus SASL. The tutorial will show how to install, configure and test Cyrus SASL using various authentication mechanisms and data stores.
Architecture
What is Cyrus SASL made of and how do the pieces fit together?
- authentication interface
- mechanisms
- methods
- libsasl and Cyrus SASL internal communication
Installation
How to install Cyrus SASL and how to get around some nitty edges during installation.
Configuration
We'll configure Cyrus SASL to use the following authentication backends:
- shadow
- sasldb
- sql (MySQL)
- ldapdb (OpenLDAP)
Testing
Cyrus SASL brings no real testing tools, but it brings sample-applications that can be used to verify and/or debug Cyrus SASL authentication. We'll use these tools to test the various authentication backends and the differing functionality they provide.
To go along, people need a computer and Cyrus SASL sources (or pre-installed) on their machine. Everybody may expect Ralf to curse Patrick while Patrick gets to do all the talking and Ralf gets to fail configuring it on his laptop. ;)
Ralf Hildebrandt works at German Telekom (T-Systems Business Services) for the Charite hospital in Berlin.
Co-Author of "The Book of Postfix", "Postfix - Einrichtung, Betrieb und Wartung" and various magazine articles.
Patrick Koetter.
2005 - Founder of state of mind, Information architecture
2002 - 2004 Head of Information architecture, management representative "Internet" at the University of Munich
2000 - 2001 Information architect, consultant at orchidproject GmbH
1999 - 2000 CTO, Key Account Manager, Consultant at Roses GmbH (ISP)
1996 - 99 Information architect, project managemenr, trainer, administration at Phase 4 Communications GmbH