[cups.general] Re: How to authenticate from printing software?

[Colin Walters]

On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 13:10 -0400, Michael Sweet wrote:
> Remco Poelstra wrote:
> > Michael Sweet wrote:
> > 
> >> Currently there is no way to do this.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Do you perhaps know whether there are any plans to implement this? If 
> > you can't authenticate with the system it's quite unuseable not?
> 
> We currently have no plans to cache ordinary authentication
> information, since we cannot guarantee confidentiality nor can we
> always know when such information is required, i.e. the IPP backend
> doesn't know if authentication is required until it actually tries
> to send the job, and then there is no way to ask the user for his/her
> credentials.

You may be interested in the printing architecture we're working on at
Red Hat, where cups runs as part of the user session.  This makes it
much easier to pop up an authentication dialog when a password is
required.

This is all managed by a program called "eggcups", which is in the GNOME
CVS:

http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/eggcups/

Basically the way it works is CUPS clients like lpr and libgnomeprint
talk to the session CUPSd, which then execs the ipp backend.  If a
password is required, the IPP backend will ask the user session for it
over D-BUS.

For more details, see the printing-architecture.txt file.

> We are hoping to add Kerberos support in a future release, which will
> offer secure credential passing in the form of an authentication
> ticket.

We're also working on this.  I have a patch I've picked up from someone
else here that isn't ready to see the light of day, but it's getting
closer.

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