In cryptography, CRAM-MD5 is a challenge–response authentication mechanism (CRAM) based on the HMAC-MD5 algorithm. As one of the mechanisms supported by the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL), it is often used in email software as part of SMTP Authentication and for the authentication of POP and IMAP users, as well as in applications implementing LDAP, XMPP, BEEP, and other protocols.
In cryptography, CRAM-MD5 is a challenge–response authentication mechanism (CRAM) based on the HMAC-MD5 algorithm. As one of the mechanisms supported by the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL), it is often used in email software as part of SMTP Authentication and for the authentication of POP and IMAP users, as well as in applications implementing LDAP, XMPP, BEEP, and other protocols.
When such software requires authentication over unencrypted connections, CRAM-MD5 is preferred over mechanisms that transmit passwords "in the clear," such as LOGIN and PLAIN. However, it can't prevent derivation of a password through a brute-force attack, so it is less effective than alternative mechanisms that avoid passwords or that use connections encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).