The saslauthd service handles plaintext authentication requests on
behalf of the SASL library. The service isolates all code requiring superuser
privileges for SASL authentication into a single process, and can also be used
to provide proxy authentication services to clients that do not understand SASL
based authentication.
The saslauthd service can be disabled with the following command:
$ sudo systemctl mask --now saslauthd.service
The saslauthd service provides essential functionality for performing authentication in some directory environments, such as those which use Kerberos and LDAP. For others, however, in which only local files may be consulted, it is not necessary and should be disabled.