Naming/Name Service and Directory Service

What on earth are these???

If you're into infosec or network engineering these two buzz words have to b e common to you. The terms Name service and directory service are often used interchangeably, but they do have some slight difference.

What is a Name/Naming Service?

Naming Service is an entity that associates names with values, also known as bindings. It provides a facility to find an object based on a name that is known as lookup or search operation.

Some of the naming services are:

• DNS (Domain Name System)

• NetBIOS (Network Basic Input/Output System)

What is a Directory Service?

Directory Service is a special type of Naming Service that allows storing and finding of “directory objects.”

A directory object differs from generic objects in that it's possible to associate attributes to the object. A Directory Service, therefore offers extended functionality to operate on the object attributes.

All Directory services are name services but not all name services are directory services.

Directory services were part of an Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) initiative for common network standards and multi-vendor interoperability. During the 1980s, the ITU and ISO created the X.500 set of standards for directory services, initially to support the requirements of inter-carrier electronic messaging and network-name lookup.

The X.500 introduced Directory Access Protocol (DAP).

Some of the famous directory services are:

• NIS (Network Information System - developed by Sun Microsystems).

• NT Domains (Developed by Microsoft to provide directory services for Windows machines before the release of the LDAP-based Active Directory in Windows 2000).

• LDAP/X.500 implementations like Microsoft Active Directory [Domain Services, Certificate Services], OpenLDAP, Apache Directory Server and OpenDS (There are many like these).