What is the SASL mechanism plain text?

What is the difference between SSL and SASL?

I've read a lot of articles on what the difference between SSL and SASL is but there are some things I can't seem to find answer for and they seem to have contradicting opinions. We run a mail service and a mail server. We currently use only SSL which connects to our server. We are thinking about moving to use SASL authentication so that users of the mail client can authenticate against our server. How do we know if we should be using one or the other?

I've read that SASL requires TLS/SSL, but you should always run TLS/SSL over a VPN, because it provides a firewall/anti-spam protection layer and you don't want to transmit an SSL message over an unsecured connection. In this situation TLS should be used over TCP, not over UDP. As for the choice between SMTPS/LMTP and IMAPS/LMTP. This is not an issue, because you can simply send TLS over IMAPS. When using SASL it will be necessary to make sure that all your clients are also able to send the correct challenge/response.

What really is the difference between them, as far as you were looking for? SASL: Basically SASL, like IMAPv4 itself, is an extension of SMTP (RFC2361). It allows client-side implementations of mail servers to communicate securely with mail servers. Although it is based on SMTP, SASL adds new authentication mechanisms (such as CHAP) which were lacking from SMTP.

IMAPv4 can optionally be extended to support SASL, however IMAPv4's main value was the fact that it has proven itself as the basis for SMTP, with which is connected the rest of the Internet protocol suite. SASL can be thought of as IMAPv4 in another package.

One of the more interesting uses of SASL is in the realm of single sign-on applications, such as Web Single Sign-On. Because SASL authentication occurs on an end-to-end basis, end users can gain authentication benefits that SMTP does not provide.

TLS/SSL: TLS/SSL is the underlying transport mechanism for IMAP4. Both protocols use the same port, number 587.

I've found two answers from web search that said I'm wrong.

What is the SASL mechanism plain text?

Why it is considered "plain text" or easy to decipher?

I understand that AES is an implementation of Salsa20 but why it should be called "SASL"? Can you say the "SASL" name for other encryption mechanism (like RSA or Diffie-Hellman)? Plain text, in cryptographic parlance, means it is easily decrypted even without the key. Eg, you decrypt a file with key /1/ and the person has that key in his possession (eg, they have access to the filesystem, but not the file). They need only spend about 10 seconds with their bare hands, and are able to recover the contents of the file.

Other commonly used names for such encryption mechanisms are 'symmetric algorithms with small keys', or simply 'small keys' (see Wikipedia entries for AES). This encryption method is symmetric meaning it uses the same key pair (private and public) for both encryption and decryption, while hash-based schemes work only one way. There is no particular reason for it to be SASL except of just naming what it is. There are lots of plaintext/symmetric encryption methods (eg, AES).

What is the SASL mechanism in Kafka?

You can find the SASL mechanism description in Kafka Java Client 4.

0.x, Apache Kafka 0.11.x documentation. But I'd like to know how Kafka works internally. I have a few questions about the SASL mechanism:

Are the SASL mechanism and the SASL client and server in Kafka threads? If yes, does the client and server communicate with each other directly or through Kafka itself? Why can't the client and server start immediately after the config file is given to them? If I want to use SASL mechanisms for authentication, how can I avoid a race condition? I mean, do I have to wait until the client and server connect to each other first? How does Kafka handle such cases? 1) They are not threads. The SASL mechs (username/password, psk, scram-sha-512, etc.) are handled by the SASL client and server. The SASL client connects to a SASL server to obtain the appropriate mech, performs the handshake, and then sends the login info to the server. The SASL server does the same thing to authenticate the client.

2) They are not directly connected to each other. The server only knows about its clients after the client has sent the initial handshake. It is up to the server to decide if a client is a valid client, or if it has the correct authorization info.

3) Yes.