Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords

https://pbxscience.com/ubuntu-26-04-ends-46-years-of-silent-sudo-passwords/

by akersten • 4 months ago

402 403 4 months ago

Weird argument about the logging password forging the same in a gui. Because it certainly it not when logging in using a terminal locale or ssh for that matter

tsimionescu3• 4 months ago

Either way, password lengths are exposed in virtually all scenarios except the Unix Terminal - and have caused 0 issues in practice. The default of hiding password inputs really is useless security theater, and always has been.

The crazier part is Ubuntu using a pre-1.0 software suite instead of software that has been around for decades. The switch to Rust coreutils is far too early.

hnlmorg3• 4 months ago

and have caused 0 issues in practice

Do you have some data to back that up? Because I doubt it’s literally 0. I make this point because we shouldn’t talk about absolutes when discussing security.

Fo example, Knowing a password length does make it easier to crack a password. So it’s not strictly “security theatre”.

So the real question isn’t whether it has any security benefit; it’s more is the convenience greater than the risk it introduces.

Framing it like this is important because for technical users like us on HN, we’d obviously mostly say the convenience is negligible and thus are more focused on the security aspect of the change.

But for the average Desktop Ubuntu user, that convenience aspect is more pronounced.

This is why you’re going to see people argue against this change on HN. Simply put, different people have different risk appetites.

blfr• 4 months ago

Just as you get used to something crazy after two decades, have kids, and are about to unleash it on them, it gets fixed. Will there be no boomer pleasures left for us millennials?

nubinetwork• 4 months ago

Is this really the thing we're complaining about though? There's a lot more annoying things in Linux, rather than whether or not I see dots when I login...

How about all the daemons that double log or double timestamp on systemd machines?

egorfine4• 4 months ago

Kids want everything done their way because the way we did it is obviously wrong and old. This has always has been the case.

leni536• 4 months ago

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.

timhh9• 4 months ago

Yeah I would like to fix those too but sudo is the one I encounter most. Also the existence of sudo-rs meant there was less push-back. I seriously doubt the maintainers of openssh or passwd would accept this change.

gzread8• 4 months ago

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.

themafia3• 4 months ago

easier to turn echo on and off than to echo asterisks.

One implies the other. You turn echo off. Then you write asterisks.

Not for security.

Consider the case of copy and pasting parts of your terminal to build instructions or to share something like a bug report. Or screen sharing in general. You are then leaking the length of your password. This isn't necessarily disastrous for most use cases but it is a negative security attribute.

uecker5• 4 months ago

I would be worried more about leaking the timing of the key presses.

gzread8• 4 months ago

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.

mikkupikku5• 4 months ago

One implies the other. You turn echo off. Then you write asterisks.

That's not how it works. Sudo turns off echo but otherwise keeps the terminal in it's normal cooked canonocal mode, meaning sudo only sees what you've entered after you hit enter. To print asteriks as you type requires putting the terminal in raw mode, which has the addition consequence of needing to implement shit like backspace yourself. Still a UX win worth doing, but it's pretty clear that skipping that and just disabling echo is an easier lazier implementation.

zenethian• 4 months ago

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.

9dev3• 4 months ago

Yet somehow, none of the other high security tools I have ever interacted with seem to do this for some reason. No auditor flags it. No security standard recommends hiding it.

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?

baq• 4 months ago

Because to hell with UX when it comes to security.

I don’t think you have any idea how wrong you are.

plorkyeran• 4 months ago

Bad security UX that results in users bypassing security mechanisms entirely is probably the single biggest source of real-world security problems.

eviks3• 4 months ago

sudo password is the same as their login password — one that already appears as visible placeholder dots on the graphical login screen. Hiding asterisks in the terminal while showing them at login is, in the developers’ estimation, security theatre.

So hide the first one as well? But also, that's not true, not all terminal passwords are for local machine

Confusing — appears frozen

So make it appear flashing? Still doesn't need to reveal length

michaelmrose• 4 months ago

Is there any reason to have this feature enabled for millions of desktop users vs enable by appropriately paranoid corporate IT departments?

Elhana3• 4 months ago

Millions of desktop users would use empty password if they could.

eviks3• 4 months ago

The reason is to protect the innocent, of course, they're mostly clueless about security! But I don't know the level of practical benefits for this measure, superficially seems to be rather low, but then (assuming silly usability issues like "appears frozen" are fixed) what's the downside?

9dev3• 4 months ago

This is literally never identified as an issue in any other system processing passwords. This feels like a debate by someone who once thought they had a clever idea and can’t let go despite everyone telling them it’s awful.

eviks3• 4 months ago

Feels like you're talking to your own strawman re. whether hiding password length makes sense, which I specifically didn't address, only pointed out that the arguments I've quoted do not support the change.

written-beyond4• 4 months ago

The number of times I've been stuck wondering if my keystrokes are registering properly for a sudo prompt over a high latency ssh connection.

These servers I had an account setup too were, from what I observed, partially linked with the authentication mechanism used by the VPN and IAM services. Like they'd have this mandatory password reset process and sometimes sudo was set to that new password, other times it was whatever was the old one. Couple that with the high latency connection and password authentication was horrible. You would never know if you mistyped something, or the password itself was incorrect or the password you pasted went through or got double pasted.

I think this is a great addition, but only if it leads to redhat adopting it which is what they were running on their VMs.

augusto-moura• 4 months ago

Had problems with faulty keyboards in the past too, never to be sure which keys were I pressed I had to type the password in a text file (much more insecure) and then paste it on the prompt. Of course this was never done in front of anyone, shoulder surfing was never an issue to begin with.

ghighi78783• 4 months ago

I agree that this move is good.

But you should not type sudo passwords on remote machine. Instead setup your machinr to have nopassword for special sdmin account and enable pubkey only authentication.

written-beyond4• 4 months ago

Yeah but am I going to really open another ssh connection just to run an admin specific command. They also didn't provide an admin user, it setup with all of the extra security configurations. You couldn't even `su`

wolvoleo2• 4 months ago

With sudo you can also give people specific access to commands.

I personally use the pam ssh agent module for this, that way you can use agent forwarding with sudo.

Wowfunhappy2• 4 months ago

Why is it better to have a nopassword admin account when using a machine remotely? The point of SSH is to resist mitm attacks, right? If someone could watch my keystrokes, I think I'd have bigger problems!

trvz• 4 months ago

Real men rawdog with root.

znpy• 4 months ago

You could have avoided the worry completely. Ssh goes over tcp that does transport control (literally the “tc” in “tcp”) and this includes retransmission in case of packet loss.

If you are on a high latency ssh connection and your password does not register, you most likely mistyped it.

written-beyond4• 4 months ago

I am aware of that but you forgot the other conditions. Keys sometimes don't register, I'm not sure why but I do experience missing keystrokes.

The passwords get updated irregularly with the org IAM so you aren't sure what the password even is. Pasting doesn't work reliably sometimes, if you're on windows you need to right click to paste in terminals, sometimes a shortcut works. Neither gives me any feedback as to what event was ever registered though.

johnisgood3• 4 months ago

You can tell if you input something or not, based on the blinking cursor, in which case it is not "frozen".

semanticc• 4 months ago

Unless you disable cursor blinking because you find it annoying (like I do).

written-beyond4• 4 months ago

I mean a trivial solution to all of these work around a could have been each keystroke registers a single asterisk that goes away after a delay. You wouldn't reveal the length and you'd had a standard way of informing the user that their keystroke was registered.

mbesto• 4 months ago

The number of times i realized half way that I probably posted the wrong password and so I vigorously type the 'delete' key to reset the input is too damn high

larsbrinkhoff2• 4 months ago

Just type Control-U once.

hilliardfarmer• 4 months ago

Get out of my head, lol :)

But yeh, never thought this was a problem anyone else delt with. My passwords are all a variant of my on "master password" and sometimes forget which session I'm in so trying to save keystrokes, count backward to where I think the cursor should be.

amarant• 4 months ago

The number of times I've posted my sudo password in a random slack channel instead of my terminal is not very high, but too damn high nonetheless

ornornor• 4 months ago

Around 2004 someone gave me Linux CDs (I think it was mandrake?) that I tried to install. And I got stuck at the password input part of the setup, I thought it didn’t work and went back to windows. I didn’t start using Linux until 13 years later… I think I’d have switched much earlier if not for that weird UI decision.

tankenmate2• 4 months ago

This decision long predates Linux. It's been a staple back to the earliest days of Unix; and it isn't a weird decision if you take into consideration of multi user systems in office environments that have non trivial security considerations (for example telecoms companies), which is exactly where Unix came from.

notatoad• 4 months ago

a sudo prompt over a high latency ssh connection

i feel this in my bones.

does anybody know what level this change happens on? is this change going to affect ubuntu desktop users on any system they ssh into, or will it affect all users of a ubuntu server who have ssh'd in?

queenkjuul3• 4 months ago

It's the sudo binary installed on the host -- if you're SSH'd to a 26.04 host, you'll see stars; if you're running 26.04 and SSH to a different OS, you won't (unless the remote system is also 26.04 or otherwise using rs-sudo)

pseudohadamard3• 4 months ago

I wonder if it'll stick though? Some years ago FreeBSD changed their setup so the initial password you set on install was echoed back to you so you could verify that the thing that'll completely lock you out of the system if you get it wrong is correctly set up. The response was total hysteria. Apparently people were setting up their 1U rack-mount servers while riding the No.8 bus and were worried other passengers were looking over their shoulders while they typed in the password. So they backed out of the change after being buried in a mountain of complaints.

One thing people are really, really good at is detecting others near them, because it was essential for not getting eaten back in the day. So the chances of (a) someone wanting to shoulder-surf (b) being close enough to do so and (c) getting away with it are essentially zero. It was a security measure that made sense in 1973 when you were on a model 33 leaving a printed record in a machine room with a dozen other people, but has been completely nonsensical for several decades.

Which is probably why it invokes so much irrational religious fervor.

crazysim2• 4 months ago

Did that echo the password back on the screen or just asterisks?

anthk• 4 months ago

I mostly use Mosh for that.

Ferret74463• 4 months ago

If you have high latency wouldn't extra echoing use more bandwidth and worsen the situation?

In any case, I don't understand the issue. TCP is "reliable" so it's not like you'll get dropped keystrokes. Just type the password and hit enter, and the entire string will go through when it goes through

pojntfx• 4 months ago

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 really never change.

silisili3• 4 months ago

Ubuntu truly are masters of going all in on being different in a worse way, only to about face soon thereafter.

You'd think by now they'd have learned, but apparently not.

necovek7• 4 months ago

Courage to be different is an open door to creativity.

Yes, it means going in a wrong direction sometimes as well: that's why it takes courage — success ain't guaranteed and you might be mocked or ridiculed when you fail.

Still, Ubuntu got from zero to most-used Linux distribution on desktops and servers with much smaller investment than the incumbents who are sometimes only following (like Red Hat).

So perhaps they also did a few things right?

(This discussion is rooted in one of those decisions too: Ubuntu was the first to standardize on sudo and no root account on the desktop, at least of mainstream distributions)

egorfine4• 4 months ago

You'd think by now they'd have learned, but apparently not.

No. Suffering is the crucial part of virtue signaling, so bugs in slop rewrites are a feature, not a bug.

gzread8• 4 months ago

Is "GNOME OS" really a leading distro?

LeoPanthera• 4 months ago

I think they mean "leading edge".

1una• 4 months ago

It's possible to auth with your fingerprint (or even a YubiKey) in sudo. It's a functionality provided by PAM, after all.

CodeCompost• 4 months ago

How can you stop it asking your password every single time? I asked my LLM and it hallucinated Javascript at me.

bblb• 4 months ago

  echo "$USER ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" | sudo tee "/etc/sudoers.d/$USER"; sudo chmod 0600 "/etc/sudoers.d/$USER"

  sudo mkdir -p /etc/polkit-1/rules.d

  echo 'polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) { if (subject.isInGroup("sudo") || subject.isInGroup("wheel")) { return polkit.Result.YES; }});' | sudo tee /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/00-nopasswd.rules

timhh9• 4 months ago

You make it sound like there was a discussion where they looked at these two alternatives and chose improving sudo over using run0. Actually I just submitted a patch for this and they accepted it. I don't work for Ubuntu and I didn't even know run0 existed until now (it does sound good though; I hope they switch to that).

Elhana3• 4 months ago

Gnome is known for shitty UX, breaking stuff every release and refusing to fix stuff since Gnome3.

rich_sasha2• 4 months ago

Why is running a command as an ephemeral systemd unit better? Just curious, I don't have an opinion one way or the other.

Without knowing more, creating a transient unit just to run a single shell command seems quite roundabout.

sourcegrift3• 4 months ago

I've been using a two character password since the last 10 years of my 23 year linux usage; I log in to console and manually start X. Guess the shame will catch up now.

uecker5• 4 months ago

Funny. But I have to say the shaming of users who have different opinions or want to make different choices (the whole point of free software) is one of the saddest development in the free software world, such as the push for BSD replacements for GPL components, the entanglement of software components in general, or breaking of compatibility, etc. No matter whether you stand, that it is becoming harder to choose components in your system to your liking should give everybody pause. And if your argument involves the term "Boomer" because you prefer the new choice, you miss the point. Android should be a clear warning that we can loose freedoms again very quickly (if recent US politics is not already a warning enough).

sourcegrift3• 4 months ago

Sadly everyone wants convenience. Nobody hates MS because they are bad, they hate them because they are inconvenient. People are missing the fact that Google is exactly where MS was in the 90s and is most definitely as bad if not worse. I hate android sadly linux isn't looking too good rigt now on mobile.

Devs are are missing the point with linux on phone. Get the point part working first lol so that people have some incentive to carry the damned thing. Apps come later

rich_sasha2• 4 months ago

You could reproduce your UX by switching to a 0-length password.

mrweasel• 4 months ago

Love "manually start X", because I've been considering just doing that. In some weird sense it seems easier.

adrian_b3• 4 months ago

You can choose the middle ground and start X in whatever file is executed by your shell at login, after checking that X is not already running and that the login has not been done remotely through SSH. Instead of using "startx" (which on a properly configured system would also start whatever desktop environment you use), you can use the start program of your desktop environment, for instance I use XFCE, whose starting program is "startxfce4".

This eliminates the need to do the start manually when you login, but like after a manual start you can stop the GUI session, falling back into a console window, and then you can restart the GUI if needed.

I prefer this variant and I find it simpler than having any of the programs used for a GUI login, which have no advantage over the traditional login.

Tepix2• 4 months ago

Why not just display a single character out of a changing set of characters such as / - \ | (starting with a random one from the set) after every character entered? That way you can be certain whether or not you entered a character but and observer can‘t tell how many characters your password has.

gzread8• 4 months ago

Because that's still weird and confusing to people and still serves no purpose.

nananana9• 4 months ago

Purpose:

That way you can be certain whether or not you entered a character

creatonez2• 4 months ago

Sorta reminds me of the i3lock screen locker. It shows an incredibly confusing circle UI where every keystroke randomizes the position of the sector on a circle, with no explanatory text on the screen (^1). To new users, it's not clear at all that you are entering your user password or even that it's a screen locker at all, because it just looks like a cryptic puzzle.

Of course, once you do understand that it's just a password prompt, it's great. Completely confuses the hell out of any shoulder surfers, who will for sure think it's a confusing puzzle, and eventually they will get rate limited.

^1: Example of it in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvT44BSp3Uc

jadamson2• 4 months ago

I don't understand your suggestion. If you're still showing one character after each character entered, what's changed?

What's the benefit of having a random character from a random set, instead of just a random character?

oneeyedpigeon2• 4 months ago

I think the idea is that each character overwrites the previous, so you're never showing the total length (apart from 0/1!)

DrawTR• 4 months ago

They mean to have a static single character on the screen and have it change with every keypress. For example, you type "a" and it shows /. You type "b" and it shows "|", etc.

NiloCK2• 4 months ago

There's no persistent reveal of password length after you're finished typing. It reduces the length-reveal leak from anyone who eventually sees the terminal log to people who are actively over-the-shoulder as you type it.

drysart• 4 months ago

There was a software package a couple decades ago, I want to say it was Lotus Notes but I'm pretty sure it wasn't actually Lotus Notes but something of that ilk, that would show a small, random number of asterisks corresponding to each character entered. So you'd hit one key and maybe two asterisks would show up on screen. And kept track of them so if you deleted a character, it'd remove two.

I thought that was kinda clever; it gives you feedback when your keystrokes are recognized, but it's just enough confusion to keep a shoulder surfer from easily being able to tell the length of your password unless you're hunt-and-pecking every single letter.

CoastalCoder• 4 months ago

Back around 1996, Notes would show hieroglyphics that changed with each new password character.

orthoxerox2• 4 months ago

Yeah, I remember Lotus Notes both showing multiple filler characters per keystroke and showing different keychain pictures based on the hash of what you typed. This way you could also tell you've made a typo before submitting it.

ErroneousBosh3• 4 months ago

Yup, it was Notes, I used it at IBM. It was an unbelievably stupid idea. Every single day people were asking why their password was wrong because they were confused by the line of stars being too long.

magicalhippo• 4 months ago

Notes did indeed do that, and I as I recall it was three astrix characters per password character.

ErroneousBosh3• 4 months ago

Oh you mean like every time you type a password, it steps a spinner round? That solves the problem that IBM used to use for Notes where it showed "the wrong number of stars" which confused the hell out of users.

g947o• 4 months ago

For a new Ubuntu user, that is probably more confusing than not echoing at all.

"That way you can be certain..." absolutely not.

jandrese2• 4 months ago

Unless of course your adversary can count. But if they can count they can also just count the number of keystrokes they hear, especially if you're recording it and they can spend time post processing the audio.

eapressoandcats6• 4 months ago

As a general rule, if you have an adversary that cares that much you’re probably doomed.

Presumably they’re capable of buying a $5 wrench to physically use against you.

timhh9• 4 months ago

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 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

https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/issues/778

yonatan8070• 4 months ago

Pretty sure the 2s delay is designed to slow down brute-forcing it.

timhh9• 4 months ago

Not for local password authentication.

https://github.com/pibara/pam_unix/blob/master/unix_chkpwd.c...

9dev3• 4 months ago

If anyone wants to rewrite PAM in Rust... :-D

If you do, offer support for writing modules in a scripting language like Lua or Python. PAM could make it a lot easier to just add OAuth with your company IdP, for example…

tetha• 4 months ago

Ah, but then you choose the wrong language or language runtime and distros ship old versions for 10+ years :)

(compare: polkit. Both sides have their point, but I've been annoyed by this standoff a few times).

egorfine4• 4 months ago

You don't get the whole "why are you overturning 46 years of tradition??" nonsense

Respectfully, we are the opposing sides of the barricades here. I was removing sudo-rs, uutils and some of the systemd-* packages from fresh Ubuntu installations until the amount of virtue signaling got really tiresome.

Currently almost no Ubuntu left in my production. Hopefully Debian will not package those.

PS: Rust is awesome!

1718627440• 4 months ago

There's no reason for it

The reason is to add a delay when bruteforcing passwords.

hananova6• 4 months ago

Bruteforcing is only really done with the password hashes in hand. Attacks on live systems are done with credential stuffing.

timhh9• 4 months ago

Definitely not for local password authentication, and I'm dubious it helps for ssh either. See my other comment.

dtech• 4 months ago

This is such a good decision. It's one of those things that's incredibly confusing initially, but you get so used to it over the years, I even forgot it was a quirk.

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.

Freak_NL2• 4 months ago

Yes… We're in the same room as the target… Let's look at their screen and see how long their password is.

Or, we could just look at the keyboard as they type and gain a lot more information.

In an absolute sense not showing anything is safer. But it never really matters and just acts as a paper cut for all.

darkwater• 4 months ago

And just sticking to counting, a not exceptionally well-trained ear could already count how many letters you typed and if you pressed backspace (at least with the double-width backspace, sound is definitely different)

SapporoChris• 4 months ago

"Let's look at their screen and see how long their password is." This article is about silent sudo.

Have you ever watched a fast touch typist, someone that does over 100 words per minute? Someone who might be using an keyboard layout that you're not familiar with? When the full password is entered in less than a second it can be very difficult to discern what they typed unless you're actually recording with video.

But sure, if you're watching someone who types with one finger. Yes, I can see that.

ahofmann2• 4 months ago

I also think it is a good decision. Nevertheless it breaks the workflow of at least one person. My father's Linux password is one character. I didn't knew this when I supported him over screen sharing methods, because I couldn't see it. He told me, so now I know. But the silent prompt protected that fact. It is still a good decision, an one character password is useless from a security standpoint.

zx8080• 4 months ago

It is still a good decision, an one character password is useless from a security standpoint.

Only if length is known. Which is true now. So it opens the gates to try passwords of specific known length.

brnt• 4 months ago

I may or may not use a single char password on a certain machine. This char may or may not be a single space. It may or may not be used in FDE. It's surprising what (OS installers) this breaks.

airstrike• 4 months ago

If it breaks the workflow of one person but makes it better for many more, it's likely a worthwhile tradeoff.

wartywhoa232• 4 months ago

How much would unknown password length protect against bruteforcing a 1 character password?

nextlevelwizard• 4 months ago

This has always been an option and your dad can just flip the default back to not show it

MattPalmer1086• 4 months ago

I tend to agree, and I work in security.

In the early days we all shared computers. People would often stand behind you waiting to use it. It might even not have a screen, just a teletype, so there would be a hard copy of everything you entered. We probably didn't have account lockout controls either. Knowing the length of a password (which did not tend to be long) could be a critical bit of info to reduce a brute force attack.

Nowadays, not so much I think. And if you are paranoid about it, you can still set it back to the silent behaviour.

tester756• 4 months ago

On the other hand streaming is way, way more common nowadays.

wpollock• 4 months ago

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.

Not sure about that. I'm no expert but for high risk scenarios one might have to worry about binoculars from the building opposite your window, power line monitoring, and timing attacks. All scenarios where the attacker cannot see your hands/keyboard.

Ferret74463• 4 months ago

Typed passwords can be reliably determined only through timing, so exposing the timing of the input can be exploited. e.g. screen sharing, or anyone who can see your screen

childintime• 4 months ago

46 years of silent sudo passwords.. it just demonstrates how crazy this world is, if this is considered news. It means the code is a living fossil and people live with that fact, instead of demanding (infinite and instant) control over their systems.

This reminds me. Linux was already a fossil, except for some niches, but now in the age of AI, the fact that code can't be updated at will (and instead has to go through some medieval social process) is fatal. Soon the age will be here where we generate the necessary OS features on the fly. No more compatibility layers, no more endless abstractions, no more binaries to distribute, no more copyright, no need to worry about how "the others" use their systems, no more bike shedding. Instead, let the system manage itself, it knows best. We'll get endless customization without the ballast.

It's time to set software free from the social enclosures we built around it.

Retr0id• 4 months ago

I'm excited about the future of mutable software, but sudo isn't exactly the kind of thing you want to be patching on-the-fly.

charcircuit2• 4 months ago

Modern password ui also gives the option to toggle the actual letters on so you can verify that you are actually typing the right thing. Hopefully that doesn't take another 46 years.

antisol3• 4 months ago

Oh yeah, let's echo passwords on-screen! Genius! What could possibly go wrong?

charcircuit2• 4 months ago

In reality not much compared to the UX win of being able to see it.

exac• 4 months ago

Could we not have used braille patterns? Start on a random one and you can just replace the character with the next one so it is possible for the user to see something was entered, but password length isn't given to someone looking over the user's shoulder?

⣾, ⣽, ⣻, ⢿, ⡿, ⣟, ⣯, ⣷

imjustmsk• 4 months ago

why can't they just look at the keyboard...

jurf• 4 months ago

That seems like it would be hard to see, even for the person sitting right in front of it.

Elhana3• 4 months ago

Deoxodizing is rather easy for now:

apt install sudo-ws

apt remove coreutils-from-uutils --allow-remove-essential

egorfine4• 4 months ago

Yes, thankfully.

However it is pretty obvious at this point that Ubuntu will absolutely remove those from one of the future releases because availability of real sudo and coreutils is detrimental to the virtue signaling they are engaging in.

After being a lifetime Ubuntu user I have moved to Debian across almost all of my production.

otterley2• 4 months ago

The setting to echo isn’t configurable?

timhh9• 4 months ago

It is. Only the default changed. Also you can press tab if someone happens to be looking over your shoulder (and your password is so obvious they can guess it from the length).

edf13• 4 months ago

That site is terrible without ads blocked… it’s like a local newspaper site, you had to try and read the content in small snippets wedged between ads!

b1122• 4 months ago

For more than four decades, typing a password after a sudo prompt in a Linux terminal

What?!

2026 minus 46 is 1980. There was no Linux, at all, in 1980.

Someone is quite confused.

throawayonthe• 4 months ago

sudo is from 1980, that's probably what they meant

https://www.sudo.ws/about/history/

b1122• 4 months ago

No, they simply don't understand the history of the very thing they report on. If you look at the quoted text, they easily could have said 'Unix" terminal.

They also repeatedly talk about a 'half century' of Linux terminals in other parts of the article. This site seems to cater to Linux specifically in many respects, so it's quite reasonable to call them out on super-simple stuff.

nathell• 4 months ago

The title kind of implies that silent sudo passwords have been a part of Ubuntu for the last 46 years.

tokai• 4 months ago

No it doesn't. It states that sudo has had the behavior for 46 years.

goodcanadian• 4 months ago

Fascinating . . . reading the comments, it seems like the vast majority think this is a long overdue change. For myself, it never occurred to me that there was any issue and I'm slightly unsettled by the change (i.e. it is far from obvious to me that it's a good thing). It is not something I've thought deeply about, of course.

ahofmann2• 4 months ago

Because you long forgot how confusing it was, that you can't see if your keystrokes are accepted by the machine. This is a change for people, that are new to Linux/Unix

fortyseven• 4 months ago

Good things always happen when you cater to the lowest common denominator.

opan4• 4 months ago

Worse than this issue, but kind of related, sometimes TTY1 (and maybe also the other TTYs) is being spammed by log info on boot, and if you have a TTY login it isn't obvious you can just log in anyway. Had a friend using Arch+i3 with TTY login, pretty new to GNU/Linux in general, so he kinda threw up his hands like "ah dang, can't log in, it's broken". I tried to tell him to just type his credentials anyway, but he didn't get what I was saying at first. Took a bit before we got him logged in and could address the other issues. I've had similar issues on my machines. I once had kernel log verbosity cranked up by accident, copied my config from another machine where I was chasing a GPU bug. Well, the same settings on the other machine were presenting way worse, constant never-ending line-spam, before and after login. Had to get into a graphical environment half-blind to see what I was doing and then turn down the verbosity. IMO there should be an easier way around that.

Ferret74463• 4 months ago

It's something that is confusing exactly once for a few seconds. It is at the bottom of the list of UX problems for either Linux or non-Linux systems.

Alternatively, if it's confusing, you shouldn't be doing whatever it is you're doing with sudo because you copy pasted a command from God knows where with zero understanding.

antisol3• 4 months ago

I expect there's an audience selection bias at work: Fewer greybeards and more spiky haired teens reading HN.

I think it's an awful idea. Apart from making things less secure it also makes sudo's UX inconsistent with most of the other coreutils. Luckily, I don't plan on doing any more ubuntu installs.

the_real_cher4• 4 months ago

Just so you know. I feel the same way!

Neil44• 4 months ago

They could give feedback about key presses without giving away the password length quite easily

prmoustache4• 4 months ago

How many people with a loud mechanical keyboard shut their microphone to type a password whem sharing their screen in an audio/video call?

opan4• 4 months ago

If you start by hitting backspace a few times and/or typing random characters and deleting them (to make sure the keyboard's working and sending your inputs where you think) it should obscure the length somewhat.

justsomehnguy2• 4 months ago

Hitting Home, End and Ins would "add" another 3 characters yet would not change the password. A full 100+ keyboard needed.

prmoustache4• 4 months ago

I was not thinking about the length but the actual keypress recognition. If you have enough recording of all kind of keypresses many keys/characters can be recognized from the waveform itself, including the backspace and delete ones.

I doubt this is a super common threat but I would expect it to be already applied by spies or "Jia Tan" like employees.

mikkupikku5• 4 months ago

A good life hack I figured out is to smear your laptop camera and microphone with sticky tack, not to totally disable them but to insufferably degrade them, then after a few attempts you can be excused from the expectation of ever appearing on video calls and can disable both permanently.

Havoc• 4 months ago

This was actually the thing that derailed my first attempt at Linux. I was like 14 or 15 and didn’t understand that concept so couldn’t log in lol

qnleigh2• 4 months ago

I hope any hold-outs who aren't convinced yet will be after reading this comment!

Did you wind up sticking with Windows (or Mac) for a long time after this? How long until you tried again?

sandreas• 4 months ago

I'd think this is OK but I'm not sure if another Option to just give feedback of keyboard activity would combine the best of both worlds.

A space with a cursor instead of an asterisk would make it harder to count the Chars

Adding a random 1 to 3 output chars instead of one would obfuscate this even more.

A delayed output could make you submit the password prompt before showing anything.

A single asterisk that switches back to space after 250ms inactivity may even be better.

I don't know, but somehow this feels underthought even if it probably is not. Simple is probably the best approach

elaus• 4 months ago

Most of those suggestions would be incredible confusing for anyone not familiar with the concept.

Users expect to see exactly 1 new char (either the key pressed or an asterix) when they type something. Seeing up to three chars appearing or disappearing after some time imho is worse than what we have today.

indubioprorubik• 4 months ago

The paranoids have had a say in way to many things, way to loud, way to long.

jiehong• 4 months ago

This fixes another issue with that if you make a typo in your password, you don't know how many characters you need to delete, but now you would.

opan4• 4 months ago

I find it's usually faster to hit ctrl-u and start over anyway.

the_real_cher4• 4 months ago

That's been my solution too and it's never been an issue for me tbh.

mgbmtl• 4 months ago

I have a really long passphrase in keepassxc. I often try to type it, fail 50% of the time, display the password, fix the typo. I would not use a long passphrase otherwise. (I understand there are other risks, such as having spyware that is recording my screen, but my main worry is for the safety of the file itself)

I know sudo-rs will likely not allow viewing the password in the short term, but the benefit to being able to have some visual feedback, is that it lets me use a more complex password.

Other example: if I'm on a ssh link with very high latency (ex: on a phone), I might type one character at the time, make sure they register correctly, and continue. If I can't do that, then I'll type the password in a text editor, then copy-paste it into the password prompt.

snvzz• 4 months ago

If it is a new tool, why not call it something else than sudo?

The expectation with sudo is silent passwords.

antisol3• 4 months ago

Because if you name it something different it's harder to do the "extinguish" step of "embrace, extend, extinguish".

weedhopper2• 4 months ago

Must’ve been hard not to name it rusdo because Rust has to come first (before any logic).

post-it4• 4 months ago

The expectation with sudo is that it escalates the privilege of the command I want to run. They don't rename Ubuntu every time they tweak the UI.

ziml77• 4 months ago

Do you also complain about GNU coreutils divergences from the original Unix utilities despite having the same names?

androiddrew• 4 months ago

I don’t know why this keeps coming up. Has this been a big deal for everyone else? Like ok usability improvement, but the number of times I have read an article about this is silly.

weedhopper2• 4 months ago

I doubt this is about the asterisks at this point. It’s about Rust, rewriting working tools in Rust and showing that Rust is the way and the only way.

burnt-resistor• 4 months ago

Secure keyboard tty entry interaction by the terminal should manage this rather than implement it in one app. Another advantage of this method is that such affordances can be generated or silenced locally, and it's code that can be shared when used with passwd, pinentry, etc. and sudo rather than implemented N times.

vandyswa• 4 months ago

When I wrote the login program for my VSTa microkernel, I took a page from the CDC side of the world--it echoes a _random_ (but small, non-zero) number of *'s. So you get feedback, but indeed peering over your shoulder will not disclose password length.

And yes, it remember how many it echoes so backspace works correctly.

b0ringdeveloper• 4 months ago

Someone should make a joke version that replaces the ***s with comedic passwords or ridiculously bad ones: When you're typing your real password, "iloveyouiloveyou", "12345612345", or "hunter42hunter.." gets printed to the screen.

the_real_cher4• 4 months ago

I would absolutely install this.

chuckadams• 4 months ago

Do like Lotus Notes did and have it update a row of literal hieroglyphics on every keystroke.

andai2• 4 months ago

This made me think, it seems like there used to be a lot more whimsy in computing. I'd love to see more of that.

Whimsy, and character.

Used to be that everything was trying to look different. Now it seems like everything is trying to look the same.

stavros• 4 months ago

While I support this for the humour factor, it does make it much easier for a shoulder surfer to count characters, for whatever that's worth.

stevetron• 4 months ago

So now there's a few additional steps when I install a new distribution to make certain that classic sudo is the one installed, rather than sudo-rs

I'm sure someone things this is a good idea, but I do not, and nobody cares what I think. But I come from being a long-time coder who's always been a terrible typist and can't depend on "touch typing" and have to actually look at things, like the keys, and the screen. And handicapped by going blind in one eye, and having arguments with eye doctors who say "get used to it and switch to audio books" and needing 14-point boldface fonts for everything.

the_real_cher4• 4 months ago

I've never once thought I wish I could see password characters when typing sudo.

It feels like dumbing down the cli.

But I don't know if this is an elder millenial walk up hill in the snow both ways kind of thing though.

Am I alone in this?

GrayHerring• 4 months ago

Stop trying to fix what is not broken. If people have issues with latency or typing then the solution is not to "bypass" it.

0xbadcafebee3• 4 months ago

They could have just made it an option to enable the new behavior. There was no need to change the default.

As for security: 'shoulder surfing' may not be as much of a concern, but watching a livestream or presentation of someone who uses sudo will now expose the password length over the internet (and it's recorded for posterity, so all the hackers can find it later!). They've just introduced a new vulnerability to the remote world.

pvillano2• 4 months ago

An accessibility feature helps more people if is it is on by default.

post-it4• 4 months ago

Someone live streaming is well attuned to the dangers of exposing personal information on screen, and will hesitate before ever typing a password while streaming. They'll either disable this feature or open a root shell before beginning their stream.

Besides, I can just amplify their stream to hear their keypresses.

halapro• 4 months ago

This is really a non-issue, all password fields behave this way, so it's not like this is a new computer behavior. This change only aligns sudo to literally everything else.

0xbadcafebee3• 4 months ago

Someone live streaming is well attuned to the dangers of exposing personal information

You actually believe that every person in the world who shares their screen is aware of computer security best practices? Or are we only limiting this generalization to every one of the millions of YouTube/Twitch livestreamers?

I can just amplify their stream to hear their keypresses.

Maybe if they have Cherry MX Blues? A normal keyboard would not get picked up by modern apps' recording noise suppression (the filters are designed to eliminate the sound rather than merely lower volume).

jandrese2• 4 months ago

I feel like livestreaming is a good example of an unusual situation where one might consider changing defaults that are otherwise good for the majority of users.

Also, I think the vulnerability of knowing that someone's password is exactly 19 characters long is low enough to be worth the tradeoff. Especially since someone on a livestream can also figure that out by listening for the keypresses.

boca_honey• 4 months ago

This is a very specific fear for a very niche sector of the userbase. sudo is the only case of a silent password I've encountered in my life and it's really uncomfortable.

roger_• 4 months ago

Why no need to make it the default? I’m all for rethinking legacy decisions.

It helps 99% of the user base and the security risk seems negligible.

0xbadcafebee3• 4 months ago

Rethinking would imply there was thinking going on. This decision was made on vibes alone.

zarzavat• 4 months ago

If your sudo password can be exposed by its length then you need a longer password. Hiding the length is just security theatre.

In your specific example livestreams usually have audio so the length is already public.

safetytrick• 4 months ago

Yes, this mattered when 6 character passwords were common.

zahlman• 4 months ago

There was already an option for a very long time, and in fact Mint had already changed the default since a long time ago (see e.g. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=1572457).

Changing the default is the point, because people often just don't look into whether it's possible to configure things. They might not even get the idea that the asterisk feedback could be possible, or useful, until it's shown to them.

bjourne• 4 months ago

The same hackers could just listen to the key press sounds.

wao0uuno• 4 months ago

How is exposing length of a password a vulnerability? My HN password is 16 characters long. Go and crack it.

gnabgib2• 4 months ago

Set it to 1-5 characters long, and let us know which you chose.

eapressoandcats6• 4 months ago

They’d still need to have access to the device, so it shouldn’t be a problem unless other passwords are the same as your device password.

Also what demos are you doing that require sudo access to your local machine? That’s already pretty niche.

johnisgood3• 4 months ago

and further adoption of Rust-based core utilities — including uutils/coreutils

Is it usable now? Do all utilities support all of GNU's features (or most)?

Aeolos2• 4 months ago

95% of the test suite is passing today, so it's pretty close: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking/blob/main/gnu-r...

There is a list of open items here, it's looking pretty good tbh: https://github.com/orgs/uutils/projects/1

wolvoleo2• 4 months ago

Good!

I always thought it was annoying anyway.

GuB-42• 4 months ago

Inacceptable! This incident will be reported.

the__alchemist• 4 months ago

JCBP!

SkyeCA• 4 months ago

This is a good UX change, one of many UX improvements needed on CLIs.

Not showing feedback on user input is objectively confusing for inexperienced users.

Waterluvian• 4 months ago

I kind of hate typing in my password all the time. Is there a way to sacrifice some security and do something like... ask for my password but automatically input it if my phone is detected via Bluetooth? (not connected, just detected).

I don't really want to just disable passwords. I recall that causing technical pains. And this is a desktop PC in my home office and I'm just generally okay with the associated security risks.

the8472• 4 months ago

wire up a hardware security token as a "sufficient" PAM rule. then it's just a tap.

post-it4• 4 months ago

Mac lets you use Touch ID or your Apple Watch to authenticate sudo. I expect you could set up something custom for Linux, it seems like the type of thing AI could put together very quickly.

Gabrys12• 4 months ago

you can put your password to a yubikey, then it's always a long press of a button away

jeroenhd• 4 months ago

Anything with PAM integration may work for you. I use the fingerprint reader in my laptop. Others use yubikeys.

You could probably throw together a quick PAM module that scans for your phone's presence. But, aside from the security/spoofing risks, Bluetooth scanning can take half a minute even when you have the device set to be discoverable so you may be faster off typing in your password.

Alternatively, you could just disable the password prompt for sudo if you make sure to always lock your screen. Or not even that if you don't have disk encryption enabled, as anyone with malicious intent can do anything to an unencrypted laptop anyway.

pvillano2• 4 months ago

How much information is there in knowing the length of someone's password?

If we know the password's length, it saves us from guessing any shorter passwords. For example, for a numeric password, knowing the length is 4 saves us from having to guess [blank], 0-9, 00-99 and 000-999. This lowers the number of possibilities from 1111 to 1000. The password has 90% of it's original strength. A [0-9a-zA-Z] password retains 98% of it's original strength

notlenin• 4 months ago

For any given alphabet A, and for any positive integer n, the set of strings of length n over A is a finite set, with (number of characters in A)^n elements.

The set of all strings, of any length over A, is an infinite set, because it is the union of all sets of strings of length n for each positive integer n.

So if you don't know the length of the password, there are infinite possibilities. If you do know the length of the password, there are only finite possibilities.

Which would in turn imply that there is an infinite amount of information in knowing the length of a password - the complement of the set of n-length strings over A in the set of strings over A contains an infinite number of elements, which you can safely exclude now that you know the password is part of the finite set of n-length strings over A.

qayxc• 4 months ago

Absolute nonsense. Apart from the fact that password length is necessarily finite due to memory and time constraints, passwords aren't stored as clear text. You will get hash collisions, because the number of unique hashes is very much finite.

Your argument therefore doesn't apply in this context.

hananova6• 4 months ago

Only if the password is infinitely long. Which it isn't. The only way knowing the length shaves off a significant amount of time during bruteforcing is if the password is already so short that the time save isn't relevant in the first place.

Gabrys12• 4 months ago

BTW, you can also enable the PW feedback on the classic sudo. I've done that on one of my hosts

system2• 4 months ago

How many times I pressed backspace more than I typed because holding backspace probably didn't work... This is a good change IMHO. Laggy remote SSH sessions will be slightly better.

JoshTriplett3• 4 months ago

I'm glad to see this change. This was already the case for GUI password prompts, and I'm happy to see terminals following suit.

This wasn't someone seeing Chesterton's fence and deciding to knock it down thoughtlessly. This is a change that someone can in fact think all the way through and say "yeah, this should be changed, it's an improvement and doesn't cause any meaningful reduction in security".

croes5• 4 months ago

So giving others a way to know the length of your password isn’t a meaningful reduction of security?

christophilus• 4 months ago

No, not really. If you have people watching you so closely, there’s a good chance they can watch your fingers on the keyboard, too. Maybe you’re sharing your screen for a presentation, this might be slightly ill advised, but then, you should run such things in a VM or container and use silly demo passwords.

wolttam• 4 months ago

Think of it this way: there’s a button to show your actual password in the majority of applications nowadays.

`sudo` and `login` are I think the only two tools I use that don’t provide any feedback.

Otherwise my entire life is behind a password database that lets me see my password in plaintext and otherwise shows the length of it as it’s typed. KeepassXC.

If knowing how the length of your password makes it easy to crack you probably have other problems

CDSlice• 4 months ago

If your password is long enough it doesn’t matter if they know it is say 16 characters and if it isn’t long enough it also doesn’t matter because they can just brute force all the potential lengths up to it. So yes it is just security theater.

Aeolos2• 4 months ago

It is not, from a statistical perspective.

JoshTriplett3• 4 months ago

Correct, it is not a meaningful reduction of security. In terms of information theory, the search-space reduction will not take make a strong password tractable. And that's leaving aside that you could already get that information via sound, or visually by looking at the keyboard. And GUIs already gave the length of the password, it was only some text-based applications that gave zero password feedback.

Conversely, making people more comfortable with security measures may well improve security; for instance, some people will have an easier time typing in longer and more complex passwords thanks to password feedback.

Usability is often a security feature.

eapressoandcats6• 4 months ago

It really isn’t. The threat model is someone who can watch you type a sudo command, and has physical access to your computer to try to brute force combinations, or a way to access a backup of your hard drive or passwords file.

Knowing the length narrows down the search space some, but a meaningfully long password basically makes that knowledge useless, and again, it’s only useful if the approach they take is to try to physically possess your computer or obtain an encrypted backup.

A far more likely effort is going to be a spear fishing email, especially since if they have physical access to you they probably know a lot about you, and what services to spoof to get you to give them passwords, and so on.

mzajc• 4 months ago

A few years ago, [0] made the following point in regards to password input feedback:

For a time, there was rich pickings in applications that accepted passwords in unbuffered mode. Many of them doing it so that they could echo "*" symbols, character by character, as the user typed. That simple feature looks cool, and does give the user feedback ... but would leak the keystroke rate, which is the last thing you want on password entry.

This was in response to keystroke timing defense on SSH. Does this feature still come with the risk of leaking keystroke timing to an attacker with recent OpenSSH/Dropbear versions? If so, it might be wise to keep it disabled on servers.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37309122

lyu07282• 4 months ago

I think in OpenSSH this was mostly fixed with ObscureKeystrokeTiming which is enabled by default:

Specifies whether ssh(1) should try to obscure inter-keystroke timings from passive observers of network traffic. If enabled, then for interactive sessions, ssh(1) will send keystrokes at fixed intervals of a few tens of milliseconds and will send fake keystroke packets for some time after typing ceases. The argument to this keyword must be yes, no or an interval specifier of the form interval:milliseconds (e.g. interval:80 for 80 milliseconds). The default is to obscure keystrokes using a 20ms packet interval. Note that smaller intervals will result in higher fake keystroke packet rates.

Although that's on the client-side, if the server responds with a "*" symbol for each keystroke it might be possible to reconstruct password length from network traffic.

koolba• 4 months ago

Somebody tell Apple to fix the login screen for MacOS as well. If your password is longer than the incredibly narrow box, you do not get any additional feedback that your characters are being entered.

Combine that with a flaky keyboard (say from a single grain of dust where it shouldn’t be) and you get a very annoying login experience. Over and over…

OsrsNeedsf2P• 4 months ago

Oh my God, the MacOS login screen..

If you have Capslock set to change your keyboard language, and your computer locks with Capslock enabled, you literally can't type lowercase letters of your password. Capslock doesn't work, shift doesn't make it go lowercase - you literally just have to reboot to get back in.

thih92• 4 months ago

If you have Capslock set to change your keyboard language, and your computer locks with Capslock enabled

How would your computer lock with capslock enabled? I.e. if capslock on that computer is set to change keyboard language?

asutekku• 4 months ago

That must be something you have changed, because if I have capslock enabled, it shows the capslock icon in the input field and the key is pressable to disable it for me.

echelon• 4 months ago

I'd be even happier if everyone adopted the old school Lotus 1-2-3 password behavior.

I was much too young to use it myself, but I saw other people log in and it was amazing.

The glyphs denoting hidden password characters changed on every keystroke to indicate you were typing. And IIRC, they were cool characters like Egyptian hieroglyphs too. (Presumably this wasn't some hash of your actual password - that would actually be dumb. I do think it indicated password length, which could give away info, but it's also useful for the user.)

Edit: this is not exactly as I remember, but it might be the same system: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/41247/changing-...

If that's how it was implemented, then that's not great.

5-0• 4 months ago

Perhaps you'd enjoy something like the xsecurelock prompts? https://github.com/google/xsecurelock

ConceptJunkie• 4 months ago

You're thinking of Lotus Notes, a completely different product.

IIRC, originally it echoed one glyph per character typed, but later it definitely echoed 1 to 3 glyphs at random so it wouldn't leak your password length.

The password thing was pretty cool, but it's literally the only good thing about Lotus Notes, which was the most archaic and primitive piece of commercial GUI software I've ever used in 45 years of software experience. I last used it in 2003, and even then its UI was so archaic, it didn't adhere to behaviors (like keybindings, and other basic UI elements) that had been standard since the 80s.

Absolute garbage software.

bxparks• 4 months ago

I felt this pain yesterday.

I use Open Core Legacy Patcher (OCLP) to run modern macOS on old Intel macs. The first time the computer boots after an upgrade (e.g. Sequoia 15.7.3 to 15.7.4), it is slow as a dog. Because the macOS upgrade clobbers all the OCLP driver patches.

By "slow", I mean each keystroke on the login screen takes about 20-30 seconds for the corresponding bullet to appear in the password box.

The login screen displays 13 bullets. My password is 18 characters long. (Scammers, don't get excited, it's a unique password that's not used anywhere else on the Internet...) So after 13 characters, I had no idea if the computer was actually working.

It seemed like there is a 6-8 character keyboard buffer limit. Or maybe I typed in my 18-character password wrong multiple times. I don't know. I would type 2 characters, then walk away, come back, then type 2-3 more characters. It took me about 4-5 attempts over 30 minutes to log in. Then I applied the OCLP patches and everything worked perfectly after that.

leptons• 4 months ago

That's exactly the situation I wanted to avoid with our aging macbook. I knew it would be a hacky mess trying to keep beating that dead horse to get it to run the latest OS. We couldn't update some software that required us to be on the latest version of MacOS (Signal desktop), so the laptop became prematurely obsolete. We bought a Windows PC instead.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r• 4 months ago

What? Flaky keyboard? Speck of dust? Are we still doing this? Are you genuinely still using an Intel Mac? Christ.

throwatdem12311• 4 months ago

I switched back to GNU coreutils and “regular” sudo, so I’m assuming this won’t affect me when I upgrade?

dhsbdisnd• 4 months ago

Seems like a decision made by and for a generation that has no regard and no understanding for UNIX.

wpm• 4 months ago

So, the article says that sudo hid the password by default because of shared terminals and so on.

I would've thought it would've been a simple carry over from before terminals were glass. Like, yeah, I get up from a glass terminal and someone else goes to use it, but wouldn't the scrollback be cleared when I log out? But silent logins from before glass terminals makes a ton of sense; it would literally print your typed characters on a real, physical medium. having

    login: cool_user
    password: hunter2

sitting on a printout in a trash can? Yeah, obvious security issue.

I dunno, I take them at their word but if you had asked me why password prompts in the terminal don't echo, I would've guessed it was a carry-over from the days of real teletype terminals.

tosti• 4 months ago

Not just that. There's no escape sequence to tell a terminal to draw every character input as something else and if there was, it may not have worked across all the different terminals out there.

I suppose you could do character buffering and quickly change to normal, print an asterisk, and back to silent mode in one write. But likely there's always some kind of edge case where things work differently. It's not difficult to disable so this may be better for the 99% and the 1% can change it back.

pessimizer• 4 months ago

Silent sudo passwords are not a real problem. I wouldn't give up the slightest whiff of security over them. This is one of the things that I see that I have a minority position on, and it lowers my general opinion of humanity.

It's on brand for Ubuntu, though. They've been looking for an audience that is not me for a very long time. I sometimes worry about Debian's resistance to social pressure, though. It seems that Debian doesn't fall for marketing or corporate pressure, but they sometimes fall when they are surrounded by people who have fallen for marketing or corporate pressure.

xbar• 4 months ago

This is an unnecessary downgrade in security. I hope it does not propagate to other distros.

The correct change would be leave the default and put in the visudo file for easy uncommenting. The "developers opinion" is flat wrong.

# uncomment below to see *s when typing passwords # Defaults pwfeedback

All of the dev thinking on the matter is based on narrow use-cased "if you're on a a host where login to a login screen and people can see you... "

When users connect via ssh keys to production hosts and type sudo passwords, I do not one iota of potential security benefit lost.

hananova6• 4 months ago

It's not a downgrade to security for any password length:

- If it's so short that the knowledge of the length makes bruteforcing noticeably faster, the password is so short that the total length taken would be very short regardless.

- In all other cases, it removes such a small fraction of time needed (on the scale of removing one age-of-the-universe from a process that would otherwise take thousands of ages-of-the-universe) that it doesn't change any infeasible timescale to a feasible one.

So either the information isn't needed, or it won't help. So not a security decrease.

andai2• 4 months ago

If the UX issue is "I don't know whether the keystroke registered", isn't there a way to fix it without revealing the length? e.g. I've seen some password inputs that display multiple dots per keystroke.

Though I guess the broader context is if the attacker has "shoulder-level access" you probably have bigger things to worry about ;)

stouset• 4 months ago

If the length of your password reveals enough information about the password to practically aid in discovery, your password sucks and you need to choose a new one.

accrual• 4 months ago

We could flash the prompt character so user knows the keypress was received. Someone could still count the number of flashes but the number of characters wouldn't be revealed persistently. I think no feedback at all is usually best though.

ryancnelson2• 4 months ago

“ That behaviour survived — untouched — through nearly half a century of Linux distributions” … LOL

ryancnelson2• 4 months ago

Linus Torvalds is 56.

sharyphil• 4 months ago

I am a 30-year Windows guy. When I work with the terminal in my Linux server I use for n8n and Outline, I think that everything is broken and that makes me hate myself.

tptacek• 4 months ago

Wow, sudo is a lot older than I thought it was.

dietr1ch3• 4 months ago

I like the idea of showing keystrokes, but I think that a 1:1 entry has arguably better alternatives.

The default entry on xsecurelock[^0] shows a character jumping on a line between keystrokes, which works well on giving key press feedback while visibly obfuscating password length,

    ________|_______________________    // after pressing a key it'd move around,
    ___________________|____________

Also, for anyone looking into preserving this last resort obfuscation behaviour you can do it with,

    # /etc/sudoers
    Defaults !pwfeedback

On NixOS (using sudo-rs),

    security.sudo-rs.extraConfig = ''
      # NixOS extraConfig
      # ===========
      Defaults !pwfeedback
    '';

I've got to say, if you were able to see me typing, you can probably record me doing so, bug my USB keyboard, or buy a $10 wrench. I guess for people streaming it might be worth it? I don't think it's a big enough deal to warrant the fuss around this change though, it's just an ok UX improvement that could be slightly better at retaining the sense of security.

[^0]: https://github.com/google/xsecurelock#options

aidenn02• 4 months ago

Not giving away the length is mainly an assistance to people with really short passwords. Knowing that someone has a 12 character password doesn't help attackers much, but knowing that someone has a 6 character password would be really useful.

kevincox• 4 months ago

It's still not very useful to hide the length. If you don't know the length and just start guessing with passwords of length 0 it only adds about 1/N extra guesses where N is the alphabet size compared to guessing strictly the right length. So it is a very small savings to know the password length.

It might matter a bit more for dictionary-based attacks (you don't have to bother hashing dictionary permutations that don't match the expected length) but I still suspect it doesn't save you much.

moffkalast• 4 months ago

Actually now that I think about it, showing the entered length is very useful, cause I often find myself entering the wrong password for something else, realizing 2/3 the way through and I have two options: to hold backspace for some random amount of time (usually for not nearly long enough cause there's no feedback as to how many characters remain to delete), or enter the wrong one and wait for the long ass delay to let me do it again.

On some systems I've gone as far as removing that delay. It's either that, reusing the same password everywhere, or losing my fucking mind. This should fix that wonderfully.

dietr1ch3• 4 months ago

Maybe it works for <=10 character passwords, but it seems to me that if you are counting asterisks in a longer password because you lost track of you input, then you are better off using C-u to clear the password and enter it from scratch.

That said, with any feedback that confirms my key was pressed I can pretty much always correct a mistake using backspace without trouble (with backspace also having visual feedback).

neop1x• 4 months ago

It would be enough to just show a single character (* or some other to distinguish) if there is something typed in and show no character after using backspace to delete the typed password.

It doesn't make sense to show the exact amount of characters. It just leaks the password length.

rishabhjajoriya• 4 months ago

The silent password was always a UX decision more than a security one sincee it avoided confusing new users who'd think their keyboard stopped working. removin it makes sense now that linux desktop users are generally more technical than in 1979. I still dream when will macOS people fix their login screen.

data-diving• 4 months ago

I’m quite impressed with the amount of ads one could cram into one single page

jeffbee• 4 months ago

It is almost impossible to find the article between the adverts.

shaky-carrousel• 4 months ago

Unless either Ubuntu has 46 years or is the only distribution, then no, Ubuntu doesn't "ends 46 years of silent sudo passwords".

incompatible• 4 months ago

Linux didn't even exist until the 1990s.

Edit: and the article clearly states, incorrectly, "That behaviour survived — untouched — through nearly half a century of Linux distributions."

egberts13• 4 months ago

You can opt-in for a "no visual echo" of any character (asterisk or not) for password prompts:

----

For KDE:

    sudo vim /etc/sddm.conf.d/hide-password.conf

insert in:

    [Greeter]
    ShowPasswordEcho=false

then reboot.

----

For `sudo`:

    sudo vim /etc/sudoers.d/password-no-visual-echo

Insert/replace `Defaults` with:

    Defaults !pwfeedback

----

For GNOME, you have to modify `unlockDialog.js`

    sudo vim /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/unlockDialog.js

And do one of the following (version-specific):

    this._passwordEntry.clutter_text.set_password_char('');

or in newer version, replace `echo_char` with `null`. Reboot required.

cozzyd• 4 months ago

Can I change my password char to an emoji?

egberts13• 4 months ago

Only with GNOME

rurban• 4 months ago

Or just replace sudo-rs with sudo.

Opinionated security tools maintainers rarely get it right.

caditinpiscinam• 4 months ago

It surprises me how many applications don't give you the option to see your password in plain text as you enter it. The messaging around password security is that we should be making them complex and unique, but then password UIs make that as difficult to do as possible. Is visual password stealing really a bigger issue than weak passwords / password reuse?

eapressoandcats6• 4 months ago

Even weak passwords is almost a nonissue. No one gets even millions of tries against most passwords due to lockouts, whereas credential stuffing is a perpetual security nightmare.

Uniqueness is the number one thing that matters. The modal attack is a remote credential stuffing attack by someone trying millions of email/password combinations from a database.

econ• 4 months ago

I say we should allow random characters at the end of passwords.

eapressoandcats6• 4 months ago

One thing to note is that pretty much every other password field shows length, and the fact that sudo is so much more paranoid reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1200/

Seriously, what does sudo even protect anymore, and when are you typing it with someone looking over your shoulder?

If you have a Linux or Mac desktop, the login password prompt has the same design choice regarding showing characters and is much more likely to actually be used in front of someone. In modern Linux development, you shouldn’t be using sudo most of the time, and on ssh machines, you shouldn’t have a sudo password.

And even if someone did see it then they’d have to get physical access to your machine. If someone has easy physical access to your machine and wishes you harm, then knowing the length of your desktop login is probably the least of your worries.

linsomniac• 4 months ago

Normalize asking people to turn their back if you are entering a password and they are watching your screen, for some reason.

The other side of that coin: If you see a password prompt on someone's screen, turn your back.

emmelaich• 4 months ago

This is a good change.

To reduce the length exposure, the software could randomly show multiple asterisks per key-stroke. I think Lotus Notes did this. Of course, this may lead to people suspecting keybounce.

I've successfully shoulder-surfed someone to discover their password (in response to a sudo prompt) by watching their hands and fingers. So if the person is close enough, having echoed stars or not makes no difference. It was long password too, but contained two whole lowercase words.

smallstepforman• 4 months ago

I’m so frustrated that the default for password fields is “hidden”. The number of times I had someone observing me type a password is < 0.001% of password entries. There is a post it note on most peoples monitors with visible passwords anyway.

Reverse the logic and make a “sudo_h” script which hides the password entry for those rare times you need it.

kaveh_h• 4 months ago

If the issue is knowing that input is being registered they could’ve going with something that does not indicate length, like a rotating fixed place character that shifts at each key press, indicating input is received without showing length.

moonlion_eth• 4 months ago

just swapped out sudo with sudo-rs. only because nixos and easy heh

enyone• 4 months ago

I feel this is a good change as it also emphasizes window/terminal focus is at correct place and user do not unintentionally type the password to another focused place (chat etc.)

anArbitraryOne• 4 months ago

I can't believe there's an easy way to revert - that's just bigotry toward MacOS

smakt• 4 months ago

Amazing that the peanut gallery of HN dipshits is short-stroking over a full-on LLM-slop shitsite writeup about nothing.

Truly, when anything in Slashdot News (delete delete) "HaCk3R Newz" has more than about 300 comments, I know it will be a merry-go-round of imbeciles regurgitating nonsense. A moronic choir of nobodies singing the same note. This one didn't disappoint.

hestela• 4 months ago

Related to the rust rewrite, I was real confused when I had a machine on Ubuntu 25 that had sudo-rs and I was trying to debug a five year old bash script from github and it kept throwing some strange errors. Turns out sudo-rs at least at the time was missing the flag for ask pass which was quite frustrating and rubbed me the wrong way due to the "rush for rust" and sudo-rs not being a drop in replacement yet. Also it also wasn't really documented how to go back to the old sudo which I found by just installing sudo and removing sudo-rs. I was already in the processes of dropping Ubuntu for Debian so that was long term fix for me.

lofaszvanitt• 4 months ago

I'd like to see a counter for how many times you typed sudo :D. And the time you wasted, and the ETA when it will be eradicated.

Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords

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