API Overview

SASL is a challenge-response protocol. The server issues a challenge to the client, and the client sends a response based on the challenge. This exchange continues until the server is satisfied and issues no further challenge. These challenges and responses are binary tokens of arbitrary length. The encapsulating protocol (such as LDAP or IMAP) specifies how these tokens are encoded and exchanged. For example, LDAP specifies how SASL tokens are encapsulated within LDAP bind requests and responses. The Java™ SASL API is modeled according to this style of interaction and usage. It has interfaces, SaslClient and SaslServer, that represent client-side and server-side mechanisms, respectively. The application interacts with the mechanisms via byte arrays that represent the challenges and responses. The server-side mechanism iterates, issuing challenges and processing responses, until it is satisfied, while the client-side mechanism iterates, evaluating challenges and issuing responses, until the server is satisfied. The application that is using the mechanism drives each iteration. That is, it extracts the challenge or response from a protocol packet and supplies it to the mechanism, and then puts the response or challenge returned by the mechanism into a protocol packet and sends it to the peer.