Securely auto-mount smb shares in Ubuntu

Question

How do I auto-mount a samba share that is password protected, without storing the password in plain text? That just doesn't seem all that safe to me.

I'm on Ubuntu 10.04 right now.

Answer 1

Plaintext doesn't always mean absolutely insecure. (Some good points can be found from Pidgin IM client wiki.) Remember that only the user who has access to your credentials file is able to read the password - mine is only readable by root access.

However, if someone gains physical or root access, the password is of course compromised. If your really need to protect the password from that, one way could be store the credentials file in a TrueCrypt encrypted area, which would need to be mounted (using some other password) before mounting the samba share. But since you're talking about auto-mount, this is probably not a viable option. It's possible to set up a script to mount the TrueCrypt volume automatically, but then there's the problem of where the password used to access the TrueCrypt volume is stored... I guess you could encrypt the entire drive with TrueCrypt, but that seems a bit overkill.

It could be there is a way to store the password in the Gnome Keyring, but I'm not aware of it.