The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol,
or LDAP, is an application protocol for querying and
modifying directory services running over TCP/IP.
A directory is a set of objects with similar attributes
organized in a logical and hierarchical manner.
The most common example is the telephone directory, which
consists of a series of names (either of persons or
organizations) organized alphabetically, with each name
having an address and phone number attached. Due to this
basic design (among other factors) LDAP is often used by
other services for authentication, despite the security
problems this causes.
An LDAP directory tree often reflects various political,
geographic, and/or organizational boundaries, depending on
the model chosen. LDAP deployments today tend to use Domain
name system (DNS) names for structuring the topmost levels
of the hierarchy.
Deeper inside the directory might appear entries
representing people, organizational units, printers,
documents, groups of people or anything else which
represents a given tree entry (or multiple entries).
Its current version is LDAPv3, which is specified in a
series of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Standard
Track Requests for comments (RFCs) as detailed in RFC 4510.
