Gnu sasl is an implementation of the simple authentication and security layer framework and a few common sasl mechanisms. sasl is used by network servers (e.g., imap, smtp) to request authentication from clients, and in clients to authenticate against servers.

supported mechanisms are anonymous, external, login, plain, securid, ntlm, digest-md5, cram-md5, scram-sha-1, scram-sha-1-plus, gs2-krb5, gssapi.

this package includes the gnu sasl shared library that is required by applications using gnu sasl. you normally don't need to install it manually.