Sasl is a generic mechanism for authentication used by several network protocols. authen::sasl provides an implementation framework that all protocols should be able to share.

the framework allows different implementations of the connection class to be plugged in. at the time of writing there were two such plugins:
- authen::sasl::perl
this module implements several mechanisms and is implemented
entirely in perl.
- authen::sasl::cyrus
this module uses the cyrus sasl c-library (both version 1 and 2 are
supported).