GSS-API is an IETF standard that addresses the problem of many similar but incompatible security services in use today.
Generic Security Service Application Program Interface (gssapi) provides vendor-neutral authentication services to callers in a generic fashion, supportable with a range of underlying mechanisms and technologies and hence allowing source-level portability of applications to different environments.
Commonly-used negotiation mechanisms include kerberos and ntlm during spnego transactions between client and server.
GSSAPI is defined in RFC 2743.