size of sasl auth

[Ken Murchison]

Petre Agenbag wrote:
> 
> Hi
> I don't know if this is a stupid question, but it's been asked of me,
> 
> The sysadmin of another ISp wanted to know "how big is the
> authentication" on my server.
> It runs cyrus & sendmail and I use SASL for authentication.
> I guess what they want is the packet size or "overhead" in the
> connection to authenticate.
> Is this obtainable?

The number of and size of the SASL exchanges depends entirely on the
SASL mechanism being used.  If you use PLAIN, then the AUTHENTICATE
command is fairly small (approx. the same size as a MAIL FROM or RCPT TO
command).  If you use something more complex like DIGEST-MD5 or SRP then
the exchanges get larger and more numerous.

Check the SASL RFCs for details of each mech.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp