mechanisms of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). This document details establishment of Transport Layer Security (TLS) using the StartTLS operation. This document details the simple Bind authentication method including anonymous, unauthenticated, and name/password mechanisms and the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) Bind authentication method including the EXTERNAL mechanism. This document discusses various authentication and authorization states through which a session to an LDAP server may pass and the actions that trigger these state changes.