One of the benefits that the use of TLS provides is that a client has the ability to validate the name of the server. However, this validation is predicated on a couple of things. The TLS session needs to be using certificates and not be an anonymous session. The client and the TLS server need to share a common trust point for the certificate used in validating the server. TLS provides its own server authentication. However, there are a variety of situations where, for policy or usability reasons, this authentication is not checked. When the TLS authentication is checked, if the trust infrastructure behind the TLS authentication is different from the trust infrastructure behind the GSS-API mutual authentication, then confirming the endpoints using both trust infrastructures is likely to enhance security. If the endpoints of the GSS-API authentication are different than the endpoints of the lower layer, this is a strong indication of a problem, such as a man-in-the-middle attack. Channel binding provides a facility to determine whether these endpoints are the same.