Here are some of my future plans for auth_ldap.
Today, auth_ldap validates a user's credentials by doing a bind operation against the LDAP server. The benefit of this approach is that the client does not have to know what method the LDAP server is using to store the user's password (plain text, crypt(3), SHA, etc.). The disadvantage is that non-SSL-enabled clients must send the password in plain text to the server. In addition, there is a slowdown associated with the extra bind operations, even when the operations are cached.
Today, each httpd
instance has its own
auth_ldap cache. I would like to explore using shared
memory for better cache performance. I will do this by integrating
auth_ldap with Ralf Engelschall's MM library. I'm not
yet sure how easy this will be to do, since a significant amount
of caching is done by the LDAP SDK.