Forced smart card auth if one is plugged in on Ubuntu 21.04

[Fabian Meumertzheim]

As long as a smart card, such as a YubiKey, is plugged into the device, the Gnome login screen forces smart card authentication (rather than e.g. ordinary password authentication) by default with Ubuntu 21.04, even if it hasn't been configured.

This locks users out of graphical sessions for as long as their smart card is connected. Some "smart cards" such as e.g. the YubiKey 4N are meant to be kept around in an USB port and relatively hard (or even impossible, think epoxy) to remove from there.

For an independent report of this issue, see https://askubuntu.com/questions/1339157/disable-smartcard-integration-in-hirsute.

I managed to work around this issue by logging in to a terminal session, uninstalling libpam-sss and selecting the alternative /etc/pam.d/gdm-smartcard-sssd-or-password with update-alternatives --config gdm-smartcard.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 1933027, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.