I recently had the opportunity to investigate LDAP authentication and particularly SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) binding with DIGEST-MD5 (“SASL/DIGEST-MD5”), because this approach provides network communication security with little sever configuration. Currently, there are  two popular LDAP gems ruby-ldap and ruby-net-ldap that provide API for simple binding on plain or SSL connections; however, in my test, both gems failed to create SASL/DIGEST-MD5 binding correctly. Read more…