Showing asterisks during password input in login, su, ssh, and cryptsetup
Password prompts not showing asterisks can be annoying when keys are misrepeated or doesn’t respond. While it adds a bit of security it isn’t worth the inconvenience. After having a slightly failing keyboard and having a feature request that I made rejected, I finally decided to create my own patches.
The following is a list of the patches I made about a year ago for pam (solves login and su), ssh, and cryptsetup. Sudo already has its own solution and can be configured through pwfeedback.
Patched packages can be installed in Gentoo Linux through my overlay
which can be added through layman (layman -a konsolebox
) or eselect-repository (eselect
repository add konsolebox
). The asterisk-patch
use flag needs to be enabled.
PAM
Patch: pam-1.5.2-libpam_misc-mask-mode.patch
Gentoo Package: sys-libs/pam::konsolebox[asterisk-patch]
Reported Issue: #407
SSH
Patch: openssh-8.6_p1-asterisks.patch
Gentoo Package: net-misc/openssh::konsolebox[asterisk-patch]
Reported Issue: #3371
Cryptsetup
Patch: cryptsetup-2.4.1-show-asterisk-on-password-input-r1.patch
Gentoo Package: sys-fs/cryptsetup::konsolebox[asterisk-patch]
Reported Issue: #522