Comment 54 for bug 62751

Marc: "and while entering the passphrase there are no asterisks shown. [...] For John Doe user it might be good if he sees those while typing the passphrase. Somewhat cosmetic, but for the records."

I'd rather not see asterisks when entering my passphrase because once an attacker knows how many characters are within the passphrase, the passphrase becomes a lot weaker and easier to crack. Instead of brute-forcing an unknown number of characters, one would only need to brute-force a known number of characters, drastically reducing the number of possibilities. For a regular password, this might not be of such concern, but a high-security passphrase should be kept as secure as possible. When entering the password in the console, it's not displayed, so I think when entering it at boot-up time it shouldn't be shown, either. Or even better, making it an option, perhaps set in /etc/default/cryptsetup or some such place, so asterisks can be on by default for John Doe and people concerned with higher security can turn it off.