ENCRYPTION - CUPS v1.1.19 - 05/27/2003 -------------------------------------- This file describes the encryption support provided by CUPS. WARNING: CLIENTS CURRENTLY TRUST ALL CERTIFICATES FROM SERVERS. This makes the CUPS client applications vulnerable to "man in the middle" attacks, so we don't recommend using this to do remote administration over WANs at this time. Future versions of CUPS will keep track of server certificates and provide a callback/confirmation interface for accepting new certificates and warning when a certificate has changed. LEGAL STUFF BEFORE USING THE ENCRYPTION SUPPORT, PLEASE VERIFY THAT IT IS LEGAL TO DO SO IN YOUR COUNTRY. CUPS by itself doesn't include any encryption code, but it can link against the OpenSSL, GNU TLS, or CDSA libraries which do. OVERVIEW OF ENCRYPTION SUPPORT IN CUPS CUPS supports SSL/2.0, SSL/3.0, and TLS/1.0 encryption using keys as large as 128-bits. Encryption support is provided via the OpenSSL, GNU TLS, or CDSA libraries and some new hooks in the CUPS code. CUPS provides support for dedicated (https) and "upgrade" (TLS) encryption of sessions. The "HTTP Upgrade" method is described in RFC 2817; basically, the client can be secure or unsecure, and the client or server initiates an upgrade to a secure connection via some new HTTP fields and status codes. The HTTP Upgrade method is new and no browsers we know of support it yet. Stick with "https" for web browsers. The current implementation is very basic. The CUPS client software (lp, lpr, etc.) uses encryption as requested by the user or server. The user can specify the "-E" option with the printing commands to force encryption of the connection. Encryption can also be specified using the Encryption directive in the client.conf file or in the CUPS_ENCRYPTION environment variable: Never Never do encryption. Always Always do SSL/TLS encryption using the https scheme. IfRequested Upgrade to TLS encryption if the server asks for it. This is the default setting. Required Always upgrade to TLS encryption as soon as the connection is made. This is different than the "Always" mode above since the connection is initially unsecure and the client initiates the upgrade to TLS encryption. (same as using the "-E" option) These keywords are also used in the cupsd.conf file to secure particular locations. To secure all traffic on the server, listen on port 443 (https port) instead of port 631 and change the "ipp" service listing (or add it if you don't have one) in /etc/services to 443. To provide both secure and normal methods, add a line reading: SSLPort 443 to /etc/cups/cupsd.conf. BEFORE YOU BEGIN You'll need the OpenSSL, GNU TLS, or CDSA libraries from: http://www.openssl.org/ http://www.gnutls.org/ http://www.intel.com/labs/archive/cdsa.htm CONFIGURING WITH ENCRYPTION SUPPORT Once you have the OpenSSL, GNU TLS, or CDSA libraries installed, you'll need to configure CUPS to use it with the "--enable-ssl" option: ./configure --enable-ssl If the library stuff is not in a standard location, make sure to define the CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, and LDFLAGS environment variables with the appropriate compiler and linker options first. GENERATING A SERVER CERTIFICATE AND KEY The following OpenSSL command will generate a server certificate and key that you can play with. Since the certificate is not properly signed it will generate all kinds of warnings in Netscape and MSIE: openssl req -new -x509 -keyout /etc/cups/ssl/server.key \ -out /etc/cups/ssl/server.crt -days 365 -nodes chmod 600 /etc/cups/ssl/server.* The "-nodes" option prevents the certificate and key from being encrypted. The cupsd process runs in the background, detached from any input source; if you encrypt these files then cupsd will not be able to load them! Send all rants about non-encrypted certificate and key files to /dev/null. It makes sense to encrypt user files, but not for files used by system processes/daemons... REPORTING PROBLEMS If you have problems, READ THE DOCUMENTATION FIRST! If the documentation does not solve your problems please send an email to "cups-support@cups.org". Include your operating system and version, compiler and version, and any errors or problems you've run into. The "/var/log/cups/error_log" file should also be sent, as it often helps to determine the cause of your problem. If you are running a version of Linux, be sure to provide the Linux distribution you have, too. Please note that the "cups-support@cups.org" email address goes to the CUPS developers; they are busy people, so your email may go unanswered for days or weeks. In general, only general build or distribution problems will actually get answered - for end-user support see the "README.txt" for a summary of the resources available.