There is a potential security issue here. Whenever a legitimate program is seen asking for a password as the result of an automatic operation people come to think of it as normal. This undermines the suspicion that we would otherwise encourage in people to help them avoid scams and malicious software.
A more serious security issue arises if you are using a normal user account and the connection in question is shared. In this case you get a second dialogue box asking for an administrator password for privilege escalation. In this case we have users socially engineered to provide privilege escalation to any user-space program that impersonates this bug. I think it would be preferable that it didn't ask for a password (even if we know that's what's wrong) and just retried from time-to-time. If the user wants to remedy the situation they can just go through what they did first time they connected, at least then they expect to be asked for a password so no harm is done. Observations based on 16.04. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/615239 Title: Every Wi-Fi disconnection is treated as an authentication error To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+bug/615239/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
