RFC 2253 (rfc2253) - Page 2 of 10
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3): UTF-8 String Representation of Distinguished Names
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2253 LADPv3 Distinguished Names December 1997 Readers are hereby warned that until mandatory authentication mechanisms are standardized, clients and servers written according to this specification which make use of update functionality are UNLIKELY TO INTEROPERATE, or MAY INTEROPERATE ONLY IF AUTHENTICATION IS REDUCED TO AN UNACCEPTABLY WEAK LEVEL. Implementors are hereby discouraged from deploying LDAPv3 clients or servers which implement the update functionality, until a Proposed Standard for mandatory authentication in LDAPv3 has been approved and published as an RFC. Abstract The X.500 Directory uses distinguished names as the primary keys to entries in the directory. Distinguished Names are encoded in ASN.1 in the X.500 Directory protocols. In the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, a string representation of distinguished names is transferred. This specification defines the string format for representing names, which is designed to give a clean representation of commonly used distinguished names, while being able to represent any distinguished name. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [6]. 1. Background This specification assumes familiarity with X.500 [1], and the concept of Distinguished Name. It is important to have a common format to be able to unambiguously represent a distinguished name. The primary goal of this specification is ease of encoding and decoding. A secondary goal is to have names that are human readable. It is not expected that LDAP clients with a human user interface would display these strings directly to the user, but would most likely be performing translations (such as expressing attribute type names in one of the local national languages). 2. Converting DistinguishedName from ASN.1 to a String In X.501 [2] the ASN.1 structure of distinguished name is defined as: DistinguishedName ::= RDNSequence RDNSequence ::= SEQUENCE OF RelativeDistinguishedName Wahl, et. al. Proposed Standard
