Hi. I'm not in a good position to write a long response now; let me know if you do end up wanting a longer response and you'll get it in a week or so. I don't think cram-md5 is a reasonable best current practice. I think it is accurate to describe it as a common practice. It's my recollection that cram-md5 is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks but digest-md5 is not. It's also my recollection that digest-md5 will do a much better job of supporting servers that do not want to store plaintext equivalents than cram-md5. The server will store a secret that is sufficient to log into that server but may not be sufficient to log into other servers. Digest-md5 also supports an integrity and confidentiality layer. I think all of the above are significant advantages over cram-md5. If you are concerned that digest-md5 is not sufficiently widely implemented then let's recommend plain+tls and digest-md5. I think those are two low-infrastructure protocols in wide use. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf