Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords

Source: Hacker News

Starting with the upcoming LTS release, every keystroke at a sudo password prompt will echo an asterisk — a small UX fix that has ignited one of Linux’s fiercest debates in years.

  For more than four decades, typing a password after a `sudo` prompt
  in a Linux terminal produced nothing visible on screen — no asterisks, no dots, no moving cursor.
  The blank void was intentional: a guard against “shoulder surfing,” the practice of counting
  keystrokes to guess a password’s length. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed *Resolute Raccoon*
  and due on April 23, 2026, changes that.



  

“Security is theoretically worse since password lengths are exposed to people watching your screen, but this is an infinitesimal benefit far outweighed by the UX issue.”

  — sudo-rs upstream commit message, enabling `pwfeedback` by default




  
    
    
    
    user@ubuntu — bash
  
  
    
    

beforeuser@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt update

[sudo] password for user:

afteruser@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt update

[sudo] password for user: ********

A History Written in Silence

  The original `sudo` utility
  was created in 1980 by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
  Its silent password prompt was a deliberate security decision from an era when terminals were shared,
  physical screens were wide-open, and the threat model squarely included people standing behind you counting keystrokes.
  That behaviour survived — untouched — through nearly half a century of Linux distributions.



  The tradition began to crack when Linux Mint enabled visual password feedback by default for its own
  sudo configuration, quietly demonstrating that the sky would not fall. Still, mainstream distributions,
  Ubuntu among them, maintained the classic silent prompt.

Enter sudo-rs: Rust Rewrites the Rules

  The catalyst for Ubuntu’s change is **sudo-rs**, a ground-up rewrite of the classic C
  implementation in the Rust programming language. Canonical shipped sudo-rs as the default
  `sudo` implementation beginning
  with **Ubuntu 25.10** — a transition that most users never noticed because the command
  name and behaviour were otherwise identical.



  Then, roughly two weeks before the Ubuntu 26.04 beta window, the upstream sudo-rs project
  merged a patch to enable the `pwfeedback`
  option by default. Canonical cherry-picked that patch into Ubuntu 26.04 development builds.
  The legacy `sudo`
  package (sometimes labelled *sudo-ws*) is unaffected; only the sudo-rs path shows asterisks.




  
    

1980

Original sudo created at SUNY Buffalo. Silent password input is the default from day one.

Ubuntu 25.10 — October 2025

Canonical replaces the classic C-based sudo with sudo-rs (Rust). Behaviour remains visually unchanged for users.

October 2025

A bug report filed against sudo-rs requests that pwfeedback be enabled by default to “make sane modern UX decisions.”

February 2026

Upstream sudo-rs merges the pwfeedback patch. Canonical cherry-picks it into Ubuntu 26.04 daily builds. Community debate erupts.

April 23, 2026

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” ships to the public. Password asterisks become the default for millions of users.

The Security Argument — Both Sides

  Critics of the change point to a bug report whose title captures the sentiment perfectly:
  *“sudo-rs echos * for every character typed breaking historical security measures older than I am.”*
  Ubuntu acknowledged the report and marked it **Won’t Fix**. The upstream sudo-rs
  developers similarly declined to back down.



  The developers’ counter-argument rests on two pillars. First, the security benefit of hiding
  password length is negligible in practice — anyone close enough to count asterisks on a screen
  is close enough to hear or watch your keystrokes directly. Second, and more pointedly, most users’
  `sudo` password
  is the same as their login password — one that already appears as visible placeholder dots on the
  graphical login screen. Hiding asterisks in the terminal while showing them at login is, in the
  developers’ estimation, security theatre.



  
    
      Aspect
      Classic sudo (silent)
      sudo-rs with pwfeedback
    
  
  
    
      Visual feedback
      None
      One asterisk per character
    
    
      Password length exposed
      No
      Yes (to shoulder snoopers)
    
    
      Login-screen consistency
      Inconsistent — dots shown at GDM
      Consistent with graphical prompts
    
    
      New-user experience
      Confusing — appears frozen
      Confirms input is registering
    
    
      SSH session behaviour
      Silent
      Asterisks shown in SSH sessions too
    
    
      Revertible?
      —
      Yes — one sudoers line
    
  

How to Restore the Classic Behaviour

  Users and system administrators who prefer the traditional silent prompt can restore it with a
  single configuration change. The setting is toggled via the
  `sudoers`
  file, which should always be edited through the safe
  `visudo` command to prevent
  syntax errors from locking you out.



  

🔧 Restore Silent Password Input

sudo visudo

Then add the following line to the sudoers file:

Defaults !pwfeedback

Save and close. The change takes effect immediately in new terminal sessions. No reboot required.

The Broader Picture

  The asterisk change is part of a wider modernisation underway in Ubuntu 26.04. The release
  will ship with GNOME 50 running exclusively on Wayland, Linux kernel 7.0, and further adoption of
  Rust-based core utilities — including
  `uutils/coreutils`,
  a Rust reimplementation of the standard Unix command-line tools.
  The switch to sudo-rs is thus one piece of a broader effort to bring memory safety and, apparently,
  modern UX sensibilities to Ubuntu’s fundamental plumbing.



  Whether you consider the asterisk change an overdue quality-of-life improvement or a dangerous
  departure from Unix philosophy, one thing is clear: the option to revert remains firmly in your
  hands. The developers have simply decided that the default should favour the many newcomers
  baffled by a blank prompt over the few veterans who cherished it.



  Ubuntu 26.04 LTS *Resolute Raccoon* is scheduled for final release on April 23, 2026.