cifscreds(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | COMMANDS | OPTIONS | NOTES | SEE ALSO | AUTHORS | COLOPHON

CIFSCREDS(1)             General Commands Manual             CIFSCREDS(1)

NAME         top

       cifscreds - manage NTLM credentials in kernel keyring

SYNOPSIS         top

          cifscreds add|clear|clearall|update [-u username] [-d]
          host|domain [-t timeout]

DESCRIPTION         top

       The cifscreds  program is a tool for managing credentials
       (username and password) for the purpose of establishing sessions
       in multiuser mounts.

       When a cifs filesystem is mounted with the "multiuser" option, and
       does not use krb5 authentication, it needs to be able to get the
       credentials for each user from somewhere. The cifscreds program is
       the tool used to provide these credentials to the kernel.

       The first non-option argument to cifscreds is a command (see the
       COMMANDS  section below). The second non-option argument is a
       hostname or address, or an NT domain name.

COMMANDS         top

       add    Add credentials to the kernel to be used for connecting to
              the given server, or servers in the given domain.

       clear  Clear credentials for a particular host or domain from the
              kernel.

       clearall
              Clear all cifs credentials from the kernel.

       update Update stored credentials in the kernel with a new username
              and password.

OPTIONS         top

       -d, --domain
              The provided host/domain argument is a NT domainname.

              Ordinarily the second argument provided to cifscreds is
              treated as a hostname or IP address. This option causes the
              cifscreds program to treat that argument as an NT
              domainname instead.

              If there are not host specific credentials for the mounted
              server, then the kernel will next look for a set of domain
              credentials equivalent to the domain= option provided at
              mount time.

       -u, --username
              Ordinarily, the username is derived from the unix username
              of the user adding the credentials. This option allows the
              user to substitute a different username.

       -t, --timeout
              Sets the key timeout in seconds. If not set, will use the
              system default timeout for logon keys.

NOTES         top

       The cifscreds utility requires a kernel built with support for the
       login key type. That key type was added in v3.3 in mainline Linux
       kernels.

       Since cifscreds adds keys to the session keyring, it is highly
       recommended that one use pam_keyinit to ensure that a session
       keyring is established at login time.

SEE ALSO         top

       pam_keyinit(8)

AUTHORS         top

       The cifscreds program was originally developed by Igor Druzhinin <
       <jaxbrigs@gmail.com> >. This manpage and a redesign of the code
       was done by Jeff Layton < <jlayton@samba.org> >.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the LinuxCIFS utils (network filesystem
       mounts from Linux (e.g. to Samba, ksmbd, etc.)) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, send it to
       linux-cifs@vger.kernel.org, samba-technical@lists.samba.org.  This
       page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git⟩ on 2025-08-11.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2025-06-10.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
       a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

                                                             CIFSCREDS(1)

Pages that refer to this page: pam_cifscreds(8)