MIT Kerberos: is it Thread-Safe?

[Tim Alsop]

FYI.

The CyberSafe GSSAPI library is fully threadsafe by design and was not based on any MIT code - it was developed to the RFC specification and designed to be a fully stable and commercially supported library for application security.

Thanks, Tim. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Booker Bense [mailto:bbense at SLAC.Stanford.EDU] 
Sent: 22 July 2003 23:30
To: Kent_Wu at trendmicro.com
Cc: kerberos at mit.edu
Subject: RE: MIT Kerberos: is it Thread-Safe?

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 Kent_Wu at trendmicro.com wrote:

> Are you sure Heimdal is thread-safe? Like a month ago I checked with 
> them and theirs is not thread-safe either.

- Rumor has it that while heimdal is not guaranteed to be thread-safe, in practice it works well enough. (i.e. there are a lot of people running large OpenLDAP installations using hiemdal gssapi in a threaded server and they don't have problems. )


>
> Kent
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nikola Milutinovic [mailto:Nikola.Milutinovic at ev.co.yu]
> Sent: Monday, July 21, 2003 10:14 PM
> To: kerberos at mit.edu
> Subject: MIT Kerberos: is it Thread-Safe?
>
>
> Hi all.
>
> As the subject says, is MIT Kerberos thread-safe and if it is, which version?
>

- There is no currently distributed version that is thread-safe.
Some people at IBM have done the work to make a thread-safe version of the API, but I don't know if this work is yet available.

> OpenLDAP FAQ warns that MIT Kerberos libraries are not thread safe and 
> that one should either use "--no-threads" when building it or build 
> with Heimdal implementation. Now, I have gotten quite used to MIT 
> Kerberos, have built several packages linked with it. It would be a 
> drag to switch to Heimdal now.

- From a programmer's point of view there is not a large difference in the libraries. In general, porting from one to the other is mostly a matter of getting the correct libraries in the compile line.

- Booker C. Bense
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