linuxmint / linuxmint/slick-greeter

Password reveal button security issues

Open
#284 0 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Vala
Stars
441
Forks
70
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

The reveal password is really useful but it have some security implications that should be handled:

Reveal toggled on

If someone wants to learn another person password it might toggle the reveal password functionality and wait. To prevent this we need to address two issues:

  1. Disable the reveal password with a timer, 10s should be enough to correct any misspellings, 20s to be safe or may be even 30s, but it should be disabled after that. Alternatively, the toggle could work as a push button, that reveals the password while you hold the button or the F8 key.
  2. Reveal status should be highlighted clearly, may be just making the icon bright red so the user notice that clearly if he sits on the keyboard. (the current icon is hardly noticeable).

Reveal passwords already entered

The other possible scenario is the user that left the password half away, because of an interruption... a new user should not be able to read the part of the password already entered, to fix that just clean the password field with a timer after the last key-press, 30s should be enough, but 1m is a safe time.

Keep the UX nice

The proposed changes are small improvements, but focus mainly on keeping the usage friendliness of the interface.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the reveal-password control and the password input handling in slick-greeter. Review the requested timeout, visible-status warning, and clearing behavior, then resolve which interaction design is intended before changing it. Done means revealed passwords cannot remain visible indefinitely, interrupted input is cleared after the chosen timeout, and the active reveal state is obvious.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
authentication, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.