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

[Simon Josefsson]

"Thijs Kinkhorst" <thijs at debian.org> writes:

> 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.

We control the text, but not the particular prompting (that's done by
the application that is using the PAM framework, which can be GUI or
text or a network server etc) -- however it may be possible to do
something better here, I don't know.  I see no problem keeping this open
until someone has time to dig into the details and tell us something
conclusive.

/Simon
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