LDAP
Product Details
- Website
- https://ldap.com/
- Overview
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LDAP—the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol—is an open technical protocol for accessing and modifying information in compatible directory services. It defines how clients communicate with directory servers that store users, groups, devices, attributes, and other hierarchical identity information. LDAP itself is not a commercial product or hosted service.
Many district systems use LDAP as an interoperability method. An application may query a district directory to authenticate a user, read group membership, locate attributes, or synchronize accounts; identity platforms may also provision data to an LDAP-compatible directory. The actual product relationship belongs to the district's directory server, identity provider, or application connector—not to LDAP as a vendor.
- Features
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Directory access standard
- Defines operations for connecting to, searching, reading, adding, modifying, comparing, and deleting directory entries.
- Uses structured distinguished names, attributes, object classes, and a hierarchical directory information tree.
Authentication connection- Allows compatible applications to validate credentials against a directory through an LDAP bind.
- Applications can use directory groups and attributes to determine roles or access after authentication.
System interoperability- Is supported by many identity, application, network, security, and infrastructure products as a common directory interface.
- Can connect legacy or on-premises applications with directories when newer SAML, OpenID Connect, OAuth, or SCIM integrations are unavailable.
Security requirements- Districts should use encrypted transport and current authentication practices rather than exposing unprotected LDAP traffic.
- Access controls, service accounts, query scope, logging, certificate management, and stored attributes require explicit governance.
Catalog treatment- LDAP should be recorded as an interoperability capability or technical standard, not evaluated as a purchasable system.
- Replace this record with the actual directory implementation only after historical district relationships have been reviewed and preserved.
- Interoperabilty
- Support Options
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- Email •
- Phone
It’s a standards-based protocol that sits on top of TCP/IP and allows clients to perform a variety of operations in a directory server, including storing and retrieving data, searching for data matching a given set of criteria, authenticating clients, and more. The standard TCP ports for LDAP are 389 for unencrypted communication and 636 for LDAP over a TLS-encrypted channel, although it’s not uncommon for LDAP servers to listen on alternate ports for a variety of reasons.
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