size of sasl auth

[Rob Siemborski]

On 7 Nov 2002, Petre Agenbag wrote:

> 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?

I think you should go back to them and ask what they actually want.

First off, authentication doesn't affect per-packet size at all.  If you
also negotiate a security layer, the encryption may introduce an overhead
on a per-sasl-blob basis (approximately per write() syscall), however.

There is an overhead at authentuication time, but it is generaly
relatively small. (for most mechanisms, well less than 1k over the life of
the connection).

Are they perhaps looking for a memory footprint?  Size of the
authentication database, number of users?

-Rob

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Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper