Subject: RE: Java binding issues (response to Jack)

From: "Linn, John" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 08:40:13 -0400

Michael wrote, excerpting:

>>>there's a method, getDefaultMech,
>>>returning a mechoid, in GSSManager. Again this doesn't
>>>seem to correspond to anything in GSS, as far as I can
>>>see.
>
>Jack didn't comment on this one, but I'm repeating it 
>in the hope that somebody can enlighten me about why some 
>such functionality is _not_ in abstract GSS. Was there 
>thought to be some sort of security issue? 

There's no security issue that I can recall.  In general, though, the
operation to determine what concrete mechanism a GSS request for "default"
will map to can be deferred until context establishment time.  This allows
an implementation to take advantage of other information then available
(e.g., initiator identity, contents of presented credentials, target of
context request) to apply local policy and resolve "default" accordingly.
Given, therefore, that the value resolved for "default" may differ for
different prospective contexts, is there clear need to indicate the "what
would be" result to an application outside an actual context establishment?

--jl

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---

From: "Jack Kabat" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 11:07:05 -0700

John and Michael,

Our motivation for adding the extra method was to provide information about
the default mechanism to the GSS-API callers. The prototype we had allowed
to be configured to run with different mechanism so the default mechanism
would change dynamically and would be something that could be configured.

However, if we assume that the default mechanism can differ based on the
information presented to the context establishment call, then our new method
will prevent this.

Sounds like it should be removed.

Regards,

jack

>-----Original Message-----
>From: [email-masked]
>[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Linn, John
>Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 5:40 AM
>To: 'Michael Smith'; Jack Kabat
>Cc: [email-masked]
>Subject: RE: Java binding issues (response to Jack)
>
>