[systemd-devel] crypto: to show stars or not to show them

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 16.03.11 13:21, Jan Engelhardt (jengelh at medozas.de) wrote:

> 
> 
> On Wednesday 2011-03-16 04:30, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 
> >After X is up all password prompts do give input feedback
> 
> The presence of X does not change behavior of console programs.
> 
> Well, as I mentioned earlier, certain implementations use a
> three-star-per-character so that there is at least some feedback. How
> about using that?

I am not sure I follow here, if we always show 3 asterisks then it
should be much easier to get an idea how long your password is. What
some programs do is randomly pick between 1 and 3 asterisks for each
char. That probably does make some sense, though might be quite
confusing to the user, dunno?

> Or, something crazy that just came to my mind is using one (or
> more) U+2501 per input character. Provided you have a proper
> font, this will produce a continuous line which is harder to
> estimate than chars having blank pixels between them.

Well, but we cannot rely that the terminal used is unicode-capable. Note
that this prompt might be shown on serial terminals with weirdo
Windows-based software on the other side, which almost definitely cannot
to UTF-8. The only continuous line in 7 bit ascii we could draw is with
underscores, but that might be irritating, too?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.