Fedora 32 Will Still Allow Empty Passwords By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 32 Will Still Allow Empty Passwords By Default

Last month was a proposal for Fedora 32 to disallow empty passwords for local users by default but at today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) they completely shot down that proposal...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-32-Continue-Empty-Pass

[GraysonPeddie]

Windows XP allows blank passwords. That's before Windows Vista came along with User Account Control.

And even Windows 9x is a single-user operating system with administrative privileges.

[uid313]

I don't care about blank passwords, actually it is quite convenient with empty passwords on your personal desktop computer at home that only you use. I lock my door.

I would prefer security in the form of EAL4, sandboxes, containers. Things like AppArmor, SELinux, Flatpak, Snap, seccomp, etc.
Imagine running Fedora on top of seL4 or Zircon.

[CommunityMember]

I don't care about blank passwords

There are always good use cases (most obviously for guest or kiosk style logins), and no one was suggesting disabling empty/no passwords as a possible configuration. The discussion was whether the defaults should be changed to make it much harder to have accounts with empty passwords. The recommendation to have a password has not changed (and the recommendation remains a yes), but the decision means that it will not get any harder to have an empty password for those that believe it is the correct option for their use case (a number of the later discussion points went off on partial tangent topics such as systemd-homed, encrypted filesystems/home, and secure boot). The decision also does not preclude individuals disabling blank passwords for their use cases.

[uid313]

There are always good use cases (most obviously for guest or kiosk style logins)...

Speaking of kiosk, the recently released Firefox 71 now have support for kiosk mode using the -kiosk command-line option.

[treba]

It would have been a shame. Gnome Shell just got better support for password less polkit dialogs (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome...e_requests/829).

[starshipeleven]

I lock my door.

(laughs in LockPickingLawyer)

[Britoid]

A viable solution would be to disallow empty passwords to sudo.

[uid313]

It would have been a shame. Gnome Shell just got better support for password less polkit dialogs (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome...e_requests/829).

Oh, this is really nice! 👍

A viable solution would be to disallow empty passwords to sudo.

But if you only have one account and cant sudo then I guess you cant create a new account.

[Britoid]

Oh, this is really nice! 👍


But if you only have one account and cant sudo then I guess you cant create a new account.

You would use polkit instead.