About the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an application protocol that can be used to access and maintain directory services. LDAP works with a directory to query for items stored in the directory service such as Active Directory (AD). The LDAP server provides a central location to store user names and passwords.

LDAP uses LDAPv3 protocol to communicate with the server. LDAP uses Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM), which is the standard authentication framework for Linux.