Linda Gricius (April, 1998):
Another important development in the field of Open distributed system security has been the Generic Security Services Application Program Interface (GSS-API). This interface hides from its callers the details of the specific underlying security mechanism, leading to better application portability, and moving generally in the direction of a better interworking capability. The GSS-API is independent of communications, and only produces opaque tokens that must be transported separately (by any convenient scheme, such as SECIOP/GIOP).
A GSS-API implementation is viable across virtually any communications method. GSS-API is an Internet and X/Open standard. SESAME is accessed through the GSS-API, extended to support features needed to provide distributed Access Control.