return to the IETF Standards

Note: The following is an excerpt from the official IETF RFC. It is provided here as a convenience and is not authoritative. Refer to the original document as the authoritative reference.

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.