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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaking the length of your password is about as bad for security as leaking the fact that you have a password, or that you use sudo.
It narrows down the brute force domain by several orders of magnitude
I didn't actually know that Mint had enabled this by default. That would have been a useful counterpoint to the naysayers.
If you want the original behaviour you don't actually need to change the configuration - they added a patch afterwards so you can press tab and it will hide the password just for that time.
> The catalyst for Ubuntu’s change is sudo-rs
Actually it was me getting sufficiently pissed off at the 2 second delay for invalid passwords in sudo (actually PAM's fault). There's no reason for it (if you think there is look up unix_chkpwd). I tried to fix it but the PAM people have this strange idea that people like the delay. So I gave up on that and thought I may as well try fixing this other UX facepalm too. I doubt it would have happened with the original sudo (and they said as much) so it did require sudo-rs to exist.
I think this is one of the benefits of rewriting coreutils and so on in Rust - people are way more open to fixing long-standing issues. You don't get the whole "why are you overturning 46 years of tradition??" nonsense.
If anyone wants to rewrite PAM in Rust... :-D
Good. It's terrible UX. The security argument is a red herring. It was originally built with no echo because it was easier to turn echo on and off than to echo asterisks. Not for security.
You got some sources or did you just make that up? Because to hell with UX when it comes to security. Knowing the exact length of a password absolutely makes it significantly less secure, and knowing the timing of the keystrokes doubly so.
But SUDO is the one bastion where it is absolutely essential to not offer hiding keystrokes as an obscure config option, but enable for everyone and their mother?
sudo is not the only thing that prompts for password in the terminal. There is at least passwd and ssh. I value ctrl+U a lot more for password prompts than the visual feedback, it's even used by GUI on Linux.
In the modern world there is no plausible scenario where this would compromise a password that wouldn't otherwise also be compromised with equivalent effort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaking the length of your password is about as bad for security as leaking the fact that you have a password, or that you use sudo.
It narrows down the brute force domain by several orders of magnitude
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Purpose: > That way you can be certain whether or not you entered a character
And the shoulder surger can still count the number of times it changes so you might as well just be normal. They can also count the number of keystrokes they heard.
I did this! I didn't actually know that Mint had enabled this by default. That would have been a useful counterpoint to the naysayers. If you want the original behaviour you don't actually need to change the configuration - they added a patch afterwards so you can press tab and it will hide the password just for that time. > The catalyst for Ubuntu’s change is sudo-rs Actually it was me getting sufficiently pissed of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because that's still weird and confusing to people and still serves no purpose.
Purpose: > That way you can be certain whether or not you entered a character
It's fun, leading edge Linux distros (e.g. GNOME OS) are actually currently removing `sudo` completely in favour of `run0` from systemd, which fixes this "properly" by using Polkit & transient systemd units instead of setuid binaries like sudo. You get a UAC-style prompt, can even auth with your fingerprint just like on other modern OSes. Instead of doing this, Ubuntu is just using a Rust rewrite of sudo. Some things…