IETF security mechanisms typically take a host name and perhaps a service, entered by a user, and make some trust decision about whether the remote party in the interaction is the intended party. This decision can be made via the use of certificates, preconfigured key information, or a previous leap of trust. GSS-API has defined a relatively flexible naming convention; however, most of the IETF applications that use GSS-API (including SSH, NFS, IMAP, LDAP, and XMPP) have chosen to use a more restricted naming convention based on the host name. The GSS-EAP mechanism needs to support host-based service names in order to work with existing IETF protocols.