19.10. Authenticated Transfer

RFC1179 does not provide any authentication or encryption mechanism for the transfer of jobs or commands to the lpd print server. The Authenticated Transfer operation was added to allow an encrypted or authenticated transfer of print jobs or commands.

Since there are various restrictions on the incorporation of authentication facilities into programs, LPRng supports authentication by providing a simple interface to encryption programs.

The idea is that when authentication is required when sending a job, LPRng will generate a block transfer job as described for the Block Job Transfer operation, and then invoke a set of programs to encryt and transfer the file, and encrypt and transfer the returned status.

Similarly, when sending a command, the command information will be placed in a file and the encrypted file will be transferred.

This technique means that the programs and support to do encryption are external to LPRng, and can use any type of method that they choose to implement the secure and/or authenticated transfer.

See Authentication and Encryption for details on the authentication interface.