# Future Directions

Here are some of my future plans for auth_ldap.

## Support for doing local password checking

Today, auth_ldap validates a user's credentials by doing a bind operation against the LDAP server. The benefit of this approach is that the client does not have to know what method the LDAP server is using to store the user's password (plain text, crypt(3), SHA, etc.). The disadvantage is that non-SSL-enabled clients must send the password in plain text to the server. In addition, there is a slowdown associated with the extra bind operations, even when the operations are cached.

## Better support for shared memory

Today, each `httpd` instance has its own auth_ldap cache. I would like to explore using shared memory for better cache performance. I will do this by integrating auth_ldap with Ralf Engelschall's MM library. I'm not yet sure how easy this will be to do, since a significant amount of caching is done by the LDAP SDK.

Last modified: Mon Sep 6 17:00:04 PDT 1999