Using CUPS to print on Windows printer share: How to protect your password?

[t_fischer]

Hello, I am currently using my Linux system in a Microsoft/Windows dominated environment. This means that even the printing service is accessible via the smb protocol only when using CUPS on my own machine.

Using the Windows-based printing system requires me to authenticate using a user name and a password. This is achieved by having a line like
DeviceURI smb://user:password/printer
in your /etc/cups/printers.conf. This means, my password is written in clear plain text in a configuration file on every Linux system I want to print from.

How do I protect my Windows password? Is there some PAM magic available? Using hashes instead of plain text? As my Linux system uses its own login system, the local password does not match the Windows password.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

The only thing I can think of is to lock down the file permissions in /etc/cups/printers.conf so that only root (or whatever user cups uses) can read it.

Current solution

[t_fischer]

This is the way as it is solved by now: printer.conf has permissions -rw------ (0600). Still, everyone with sufficient sudo permissions can read the file or if I make a backup of /etc, it will be stored somewhere without protection...
Still, thanks for your suggestion!