[Pkg-auth-maintainers] Bug#776229: Bug#776229: libpam-yubico: Provide visual feedback that button is pressed

[Thijs Kinkhorst]

On Mon, January 26, 2015 00:16, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Thijs Kinkhorst <thijs at debian.org> writes:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> When authentication via yubikey is triggered, the module prompts:
>>
>>   YubiKey for `username':
>>
>> However, there's no visual feedback that characters are being input when
>> you press the button on the yubikey, so as a user you're unsure if
>> anything
>> is happening (and this may take half a second or more). Especially with
>> the Nano which has no physical feedback when touching it.
>>
>> It would be nice if the prompt would change when the first character of
>> input was received.
>
> Hi.  Is this even possible to achieve from libpam-yubico?  The module
> doesn't know that it is used with a terminal, it might be called from a
> GNOME Screensaver, non-interactive SSH server, or whatever.  The
> application is responsible for these user interaction settings.
>
> Have you seen any other PAM module behave in a way that we could mimic?
> Then we can look at the code of that and see if that is applicable to
> our module.

I'm not very much into PAM internals so it didn't occur to me that this
may be problematic. I decuded from the "Yubikey for" text that the module
had influence over the prompt. If this is not feasible then please close
this request.


Cheers,
Thijs