Bug#708181:

[Christian Kastner]

On 2013-05-13 22:03, Bernhard R. Link wrote
> After upgrading to 2.00-14, grub asks for a password at boot time
> and no longer boots unless the superuser password is entered.

On 2014-01-11 17:34, Kim Rydhof Thor Hansen wrote:
> I was also bitten by this bug, the problem it that the default 
> behaviour for menus with no security defined has changed from
> being unrestricted to being restricted if some users are defined.

Within the Red Hat bug report for this issue, a solution was
proposed[0] that seems to be simple yet clean: make the behavior
configurable by introducing a GRUB_RESTRICTED variable. This way, the
new (much stricter) behavior can be used by default, yet one can still
revert back to the old behavior with a simple change in /etc/default/grub.

This change in default behavior really is a bad oversight. There no
longer seems to be a way to generally protect menu entries from
editing only, as there has been for ages before. With the new
behavior, this is only possible by changing /etc/grub.d/10_linux, or
the final grub.conf itself.

I've included links to the Red Hat[1] and Mint[2] bugs for reference.

Christian

[0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=840204#c32
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=840204
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1223147