This module provides the mod_auth_basic authentication front-end a way to authenticate users by checking credentials via the cyrus sasl library.

username and password are checked against the sasl password checking backends, kerberos5, pam, rimap, shadow and ldap are some of the supported mechanisms.

one of the interesting parts of using a sasl backend is that you do not need to elevate apache httpd's access rights to superuser privileges, even when validating through shadow database.