7.2 Authentication

Provisions for authentication of caller to service and vice-versa are provided as a part of the RPC protocol. The call message has two authentication fields, the credential and verifier. The reply message has one authentication field, the response verifier. The RPC protocol specification defines all three fields to be the following opaque type (in the eXternal Data Representation (XDR) language [9]):

      enum auth_flavor {
         AUTH_NONE       = 0,
         AUTH_SYS        = 1,
         AUTH_SHORT      = 2
         /* and more to be defined */
      };

      struct opaque_auth {
         auth_flavor flavor;
         opaque body<400>;
      };

In other words, any "opaque_auth" structure is an "auth_flavor" enumeration followed by up to 400 bytes which are opaque to (uninterpreted by) the RPC protocol implementation.

The interpretation and semantics of the data contained within the authentication fields is specified by individual, independent authentication protocol specifications. (Section 9 defines the various authentication protocols.)

If authentication parameters were rejected, the reply message contains information stating why they were rejected.