The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol:
X.500 Lite

This paper describes the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which provides low-overhead access to the X.500 directory. LDAP includes a subset of full X.500 functionality. It runs directly over TCP and uses a simplified data representation for many protocol elements. These simplifications make LDAP clients smaller, faster, and easier to implement than full X.500 clients. Our freely available implementation of the protocol is also described. It includes an LDAP server and a client library that makes writing LDAP programs much easier.


July 27, 1995


Center for Information Technology Integration
University of Michigan
519 West William Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48103-4943

Contents

• 1. Introduction

• 2. Overview of X.500

• 3. Overview of LDAP

• 4. Key Advantages

• 5. Implementation

• 6. Performance

• 7. Future Work

• 8. Summary

• 9. Acknowledgements

• References

• Author Information