RFC 3674 (rfc3674) - Page 2 of 5

Feature Discovery in Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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RFC 3674               Feature Discovery in LDAP           December 2003


   Schema definitions are provided using LDAP description formats
   [RFC 2252].  Definitions provided here are formatted (line wrapped)
   for readability.

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC 2119].

2.  Discovery of supported features

   Each elective feature whose support may be discovered SHALL be
   identified by an Object Identifier (OID).  A server advertises its
   support for a given feature by providing the OID associated with the
   feature as a value of the 'supportedFeatures' attribute held in the
   root DSE.  A client may examine the values of this attribute to
   determine if a particular feature is supported by the server.  A
   client MUST ignore values it doesn't recognize as they refer to
   elective features it doesn't implement.

   Features associated with Standard Track protocol mechanisms MUST be
   registered.  Features associated with other protocol mechanisms
   SHOULD be registered.  Procedures for registering protocol mechanisms
   are described in BCP 64 [RFC 3383].  The word "Feature" should be
   placed in the usage field of the submitted LDAP Protocol Mechanism
   template.

   The 'supportedFeatures' attribute type is described as follows:

      ( 1.3.6.1.4.1.4203.1.3.5
        NAME 'supportedFeatures'
        DESC 'features supported by the server'
        EQUALITY objectIdentifierMatch
        SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.38
        USAGE dSAOperation )

   Servers MUST be capable of recognizing this attribute type by the
   name 'supportedFeatures'.  Servers MAY recognize the attribute type
   by other names.

3.  Security Considerations

   As rogue clients can discover features of a server by other means
   (such as by trial and error), this feature discovery mechanism is not
   believed to introduce any new security risk to LDAP.







Zeilenga                    Standards Track
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