The GSS-API does not include a gss_release_oid() function; GSS calls 
which output OIDs are expected to use OIDs from static storage that do 
not need to be freed.  Our library includes a gss_release_oid() 
function largely to accomodate the gss_str_to_oid() extension.  
Providing this function carries the risk that an application might 
erroneously call gss_release_oid() with an OID returned by a GSS call, 
which would result in freeing static pointers in a naive 
implementation.  To guard against such bugs (and for historical 
reasons not discussed here), gss_release_oid() tries to check whether 
the released OID is one of the static OIDs that could have been 
returned from a GSS call, and does nothing in that case.

Currently we implement this check by iterating over the mech list 
calling gss_internal_release_oid() with the OID pointer.  If any mech 
returns successfully (indicating that it recognized the OID), we stop 
and don't free the OID memory.  This approach is brittle: if a 
mechanism does not keep its gss_internal_release_oid() implementation 
up to date, the guard stops working correctly, but no one notices 
until a buggy application calls gss_release_oid() with one of the 
particular static OIDs that should have been included in the guard.

Nico suggested a more robust approach: every time a GSS call (other 
than gss_str_to_oid()) outputs an OID, we could add that OID pointer 
to a global set of guarded OID pointers.  Once implemented correctly, 
this approach is guaranteed to continue to work for all static OIDs.  
A down side is that this mutable set (unless restricted to a fixed 
maximum size) would leak each time the GSS library is unloaded on a 
platform without library finalizers, but we already have that problem 
with the mech table.

(Another, rejected approach is for gss_str_to_oid() to memoize its 
results in an ever-growing table, and for gss_release_oid() to do 
nothing.  This approach could result in a denial of service attack 
against an application which calls gss_str_to_oid() based on input 
from a possibly untrustworthy party.)