RFC 1777 (rfc1777) - Page 1 of 22
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group W. Yeong
Request for Comments: 1777 Performance Systems International
Obsoletes: 1487 T. Howes
Category: Standards Track University of Michigan
S. Kille
ISODE Consortium
March 1995
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
The protocol described in this document is designed to provide access
to the X.500 Directory while not incurring the resource requirements
of the Directory Access Protocol (DAP). This protocol is specifically
targeted at simple management applications and browser applications
that provide simple read/write interactive access to the X.500
Directory, and is intended to be a complement to the DAP itself.
Key aspects of LDAP are:
- Protocol elements are carried directly over TCP or other transport,
bypassing much of the session/presentation overhead.
- Many protocol data elements are encoding as ordinary strings (e.g.,
Distinguished Names).
- A lightweight BER encoding is used to encode all protocol elements.
1. History
The tremendous interest in X.500 [1,2] technology in the Internet has
lead to efforts to reduce the high "cost of entry" associated with
use of the technology, such as the Directory Assistance Service [3]
and DIXIE [4]. While efforts such as these have met with success,
they have been solutions based on particular implementations and as
such have limited applicability. This document continues the efforts
to define Directory protocol alternatives but departs from previous
efforts in that it consciously avoids dependence on particular
Yeong, Howes & Kille