Macos – Force OSX text field to accept copy-paste

encryptionmacmacososx-mountain-lionpasswords

Short version: Is there a way to force text field in OSX to accept pasting a string, despite that the developer (Apple) set it to not to accept copy-paste?

Long story:

Platform: OS X 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion)

Just connected a new external drive, set it to be encrypted (HFS+ encrypted partition). It works as expected.

The problem I have is that I have set a long, randomly generated password. As many others, I have saved this one in KeePassX. Everything would be great… except of the fact Apple does not allow me to simply paste a password into "enter password" dialog that is displayed after connecting a drive!

It is very annoying to rewrite long, random string from one window to second one each time when drive is detected. Is there any way to force the input field to accept pasted password?

To unlock disk "***", type password.

One solution would be storing password in OS X KeyChain, but… it seems that there is a bug with that. The 'input password' window does not disappear even after properly mounting a volume. I type password, click 'Unlock' and the controls are grayed out. After a few seconds, I see that drive appears in Finder, but 'input dialog' windows shakes like in case when wrong password was typed – and reverst back to it's original state. Additionally, despite of checked option to store password in KeyChain, it is not written there (I suppose those two may be related). So, checking "Store in keychain" does not solve my problem…

Best Answer

It's not really more convenient in this case, but you could run this in AppleScript Editor:

tell application "System Events" to tell process "SecurityAgent"
    set value of text field 1 of window 1 to the clipboard
    click button 1 of window 1
end tell

When I clicked the remember in keychain checkbox, the password was saved in the login keychain with the name of the volume, and the volume was subsequently mounted without requiring a password.

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Good encryption allows for no recovery. That's how it protects your system from other people.

Encryption sounds like a good idea till you learn to live with it and take extra precautions to prevent the data loss it will force upon you in the event you lose the password. Upon covering all the bases it becomes a useful tool to prevent recovery of data from stolen equipment and not a liability from forgetting the password.

Various other operating systems allow for making a recovery disk or thumb drive when you first encrypt the disk that you can then store in a safe place in case this event happens.

The only recourse is to get it right at least once if you have it written down correctly.

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You need to pay attention to this points while crypting anything:

● Confidentiality
● Integrity
● Authenticity
● Non-repudiation
● Access control
● Difficulty compromise

Taking this as the base you shoud choose the method wich helps you the most. (Being an Asymetric cypher a great way of accommplish a lot of the above.[Use a private and a public key..])

Also Here's the GPG QuickStart Guide.

In the symetric ways there is AES(128, 192, 256 bits) and DES(64 bit per block)

Check this part of this OpenSSL Manual

As someone says above using GPG is a great Idea beacuse of the use of Assymetric Keys which is always safer than just Passwords in any access...

To get a list of Cipher methos you can use:

openssl list-cipher-commands

So for example an AES Cipher:

openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -in file.txt -out file.enc

And to decrypt

openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -a -in file.enc

Still, you may have occasion to want to encrypt a file without having to build or use a key/certificate structure.

In the link there is the How do I base64-encode something? part and the How do I simply encrypt a file? part. Hope this can help you

For more info Dive onto Asymmetric key techniques and Symmetric-key

Here's the RFC for Determining Strengths For Public Keys Used For Exchanging Symmetric Keys

Hope this helps. Remember Always to read the manual of what you use.

Best Answer

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