What is LDAP?

Ldap is a protocol designed to access a directory service and access user and computer information.

Although Ldap (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is actually a protocol, it is commonly used to refer to software that implements this functionality.

An Ldap server is a fundamental part of a Windows infrastructure with Active directory, since it stores the information of a domain. For this reason, an adequate security configuration of LDAP in these environments is essential.

As with other application protocols such as HTTP, LDAP also supports secure connections, through LDAPs in version 2, and encrypted connections with TLS in LDAPv3.

Other implementations, such as OpenLDAP or Red Hat’s Directory server, are also used to centralise authentication in Linux environments.

To reference an ldap server and perform a query, a url with the following format is used:

ldap://ldap.example.com/cn=john,dc=example,dc=com