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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: TCP wheel re-invention
Message-ID: <24831:Oct1822:55:3190@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 90 22:55:31 GMT
References: <53731@brunix.UUCP>
Organization: IR
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In article <53731@brunix.UUCP> rjd@cs.brown.edu (Rob Demillo) writes:
> A few days ago I requested that people refer me to some public
> domain libraries that would handle all the dirty work
> of UNIX TCP I/O via sockets - I knew a million other people
> must have done it, and I wasn't in the modd to re-invent the wheel.
  [ Don Libes' pub/sized_io.shar.Z on durer.cme.nist.gov ]

An alternative is my auth package, comp.sources.unix volume 22. It
provides two big advantages over sized_io:

  1. It's modular. Programs written for auth can be ported to any other
     communications system that provides auth's interface, without even
     being recompiled. You can use the communications from the shell, or
     run a single auth-based program over several different networks at
     once.

  2. It tells you the remote username, a la RFC 931. Of course, you can
     use the programs without this added security, but if you want you
     can easily achieve a level of authentication only exceeded among
     current protocols by Kerberos. (And Kerberos isn't exportable.)

Lots of sample applications, including scripts to wrap authenticated
username logging around sendmail, are provided in the authutil package,
also in comp.sources.unix volume 22. auth and authutil should work on
any BSD-based system.

---Dan