Bug#831509: [pkg-cryptsetup-devel] Bug#831509: cryptsetup fails to unlock volumes with accented letters passwords

[André Cardoso]

Hi Guilhem, how are you?

Well, your suggestion is good but I don't think it is an ideal way to solve
this...

For tests purposes, I had installed the latest release of Ubuntu Desktop
(16.04) and it don't have this "problem"... I think they managed to solve
that by loading the keyboard module before the prompt of the cryptographic
passphrase. I really want to help more but I'm not any good with these
things in Linux, sorry...

Maybe you will need to talk to someone from Debian to define a better
sequence for loading the modules at the boot time.

Could you test the Ubuntu 16.04 to see how it works?

Thank you for your response and sorry about the lack of more information
about how to solve the issue...


2016-09-13 20:15 GMT-03:00 Guilhem Moulin :

> Hi Andre,
>
> On Sat, 16 Jul 2016 at 15:02:40 -0300, Andre wrote:
> > During the installation process of setting up my operating system, I
> > chose as the default keyboard layout the Portuguese (Brazilian), then
> > set up the encryption of disk volumes and then set an encryption
> > password using accented characters.
>
> FWIW, this what the cryptsetup(8) manpage says about this:
>
> Character encoding: If you enter a passphrase with special symbols,
> the passphrase can change depending character encoding.  Keyboard
> settings can also change, which can make blind input hard or
> impossible.  For example, switching from some ASCII 8-bit variant to
> UTF-8 can lead to a different binary encoding and hence different
> passphrase seen by cryptsetup, even if what you see on the terminal
> is exactly the same.  It is therefore highly recommended to select
> passphrase characters only from 7-bit ASCII, as the encoding for
> 7-bit ASCII stays the same for all ASCII variants and UTF-8.
>
> Perhaps we should make the installer print a warning if the user enters
> non 7-bit ASCII characters?
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Guilhem.
>

Bug#831511: cryptsetup fails to unlock volumes with accented letters passwords

[André Cardoso]

Source: cryptsetup
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

During the installation process of setting up my operating system, I
chose as the default keyboard layout the Portuguese (Brazilian), then
set up the encryption of disk volumes and then set an encryption
password using accented characters.

After the initial boot was presented the prompt "Please unlock disk
sda1_crypt:"

Then I typed my password and received the following message: "cryptseup:
cryptsetup failed, bad password or option?". So I ended up locked out
of the operating system.

To solve the problem, I had to re-install Debian Jessie and set a
cryptographic password without accented characters and then managed to
unlock the encrypted volume.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.5
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)