How to remove "user at host's password" from ssh login prompt?

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2018 at 11:11:10AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 04, 2018 at 10:39:26AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 04, 2018 at 10:19:56AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> > > Yes, it's not a *big* issue but I'd really prefer not to give someone
> > > who happens to get a prompt the name of the system and the user.  One
> > > system I use just presents "Password:" and I'd like to do the same.
> > 
> > I could understand this if it were something presented by the server,
> > but it's not - the prompt is presented by the client.  It sounds like
> > you're thinking that this is information leaked by the server, but it
> > isn't.
> 
> I don't really care where it comes from and what you say doesn't
> actually make sense to me.

Well, it matters in a non-pedantic way because if it's from the server
then it's an information leak, while if it's from the client then it
isn't.

> One system that I ssh into doesn't present either my name or the
> system's host name, other systems *do* give my name and the host name.
> These are all Linux systems and I'm logging in from the same client to
> all of them.  So - how does one manage not to present user name and
> host name while all the others do?

That sounds like one of those is going through some other authentication
method while the others are going through password authentication.
Without seeing at least a transcript of connecting to the first system,
it's hard to tell.

Ideally, I'd recommend just setting up public-key authentication to
everything you use at all regularly.  Password authentication sometimes
makes sense as a fallback or before you've set up anything better, but
public-key authentication is easier to use once you've set it up (since
you won't be prompted at all) and generally safer if you trust your
client.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]