crypttab LUKS password shown in cleartext

[Johannes Bauer]

After updating to 11.10, I was shocked to see that passwords that are used for LUKS disk encryption are now shown in cleartext while entrering them. I am not using the (incredibly stupid/ugly, BTW) splash screen, but regular startup. It does not matter wheter framebuffer is enabled or not. When the point comes where I should enter my password, I see the

Enter passphrase:

prompt. When I enter my password there, it appears in clear text! This means I see

Enter passphrase: mypassubuntufuckedup1234

Only when I press enter do I see the passphrase in asterisks, i.e.

Enter passphrase: mypassubuntufuckedup1234
Enter passphrase: ************************

This is - as you can image - not very helpful (since the password is already there in clear text).

I have this problem on one system which I upgraded from Natty and one one fresh install that I just did.

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

Hi Johannes,
  Just for clarification, can you explain:
   1) Are you using full disk LUKS, or just one partition
   2) How did you set it up - did you manually edit cryptab or the like?
   3) How did you disable the gui splash

Dave
(P.S. Please try and avoid swear words in bug reports; even when it is frustratingly broken; I don't mind them, some people do).

[Johannes Bauer (jb-imm)]

Hi Dave,

1) Just one partition, my home
2) I manually edited crypttab:
crypthome UUID=foo-bar-bar-foo none luks

3) I edited /etc/grub/default/grub and changed

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="gfxpayload=text"

also uncommented (but that shouldn't matter)

GRUB_TERMINAL=console

Then reran update-grub. This gives me nice text-only no-framebuffer bootup.

About the swaring: You are of course correct, I will avoid that in the future. One should not write bug reports when annoyed, I guess. My apologies.

Best regards,
Joe

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

Medium: Because of security implication but for a small number of users

[Karsten Stieg (78luphr0rnk2nuqimstywepozxn9kl19tqh0tx66b5dki1xx-launchpad-a811i2i3ytqlsztthjth0svbccw8inm65tmkqp9sarr553jq)]

I can confirm this bug.

I have a crypted root-partition, where everything is fine (* for each key pressed, no clear text shown), but with my crypted data-raid-partition it's the same as mentioned above.

Since it's a data-partition and not needed for boot-up, I set noauto in fstab, took it out of crypttab, created a startscript 'init.d/cryptmount' and did a 'update-rc.d -f cryptmount defaults 99' with it. Voilá, didn't solve the problem but have a workaround, password is not shown anymore. Works for now.

Best regards,
Karsten