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

Back to top