SASL is a generic mechanism for authentication used by several network protocols. Authen::SASL provides an implementation framework that all protocols should be able to share. . The framework allows different implementations of the connection class to be plugged in. At the time of writing there were two such plugins: - Authen::SASL::Perl This module implements several mechanisms and is implemented entirely in Perl. - Authen::SASL::Cyrus This module uses the Cyrus SASL C-library (both version 1 and 2 are supported).