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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 18.03.11 00:18, Jan Engelhardt (jengelh at medozas.de) wrote:

> Meanwhile, I have two new suggestions.

I have one too (or actually Kay came up with it), and I think you are
going to like it:

Start with showing input feedback as we currently do. If the user then
presses TAB the stars disappear, and instead we show "(no echo)" or
so. Then, the user can proceed with typing his password without
asterisks.

This should be strictly one way however: you can enter the no-echo mode
but not leave it anymore. For two reasons: so that people cannot take
over your machine and make visible what you explicitly wanted to hide:
the length of your password. And secondly, there might be weird folks
with Tabs in their passphrases (though they are probably going through
hell if they do), and by pressing TAB twice they thus have a way to
enter a single TAB. 

If you prep a patch for this logic I'd merge it right-away and I think
both of us should be perfectly happy, right?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.