RFC 1487 (rfc1487) - Page 1 of 21

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Network Working Group                                           W. Yeong
Request for Comments: 1487             Performance Systems International
                                                                T. Howes
                                                  University of Michigan
                                                                S. Kille
                                                        ISODE Consortium
                                                               July 1993


              X.500 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

Status of this Memo

   This RFC specifies an IAB standards track protocol for the Internet
   community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
   Please refer to the current edition of the "IAB Official Protocol
   Standards" 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 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 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
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