Bug#379737: [Pkg-cryptsetup-devel] Bug#379737: cryptsetup: cannot handle UTF-8 in passphrase

[Robert Bihlmeyer]

David Härdeman <david at 2gen.com> writes:

> I'll add some code later this week to the initramfs hook which checks for
> a UTF-8 locale (the same code that the kbd package init.d script uses),
> and if so, the initramfs script will have to run "kbd_mode -u" and
> "loadkeys --unicode" instead of simply running loadkeys.

Makes sense.

There is a caveat: if someone has a latin1 locale, sets a passphrase with
non-ascii characters, and later changes to a utf8 locale, he is subsequently
locked out of his data.

(That will actually happen to me as I temporarily changed to a latin1 locale
to set my passphrase -- as a workaround to this bug. Once your fix hits my
machine this passphrase, containing non-UTF8 sequences, is unusable. Of course
I am forewarned, and can fix things...)

I wonder whether having non-ascii in my passphrase is worth it. It is more
"unstable" than one would think.

My other solution (normalising the passphrase to UTF-8 always) would have no
such problems, but it's a rather big hammer -- we can't put big translation
tables on initramfs I guess.

Take care,
-- 
Robbe