Use Touch ID for sudo on Mac
The landscape of security is changing quite a bit. We've gone from basic username and password to 2FA, facial recognition, fingerprint recognition, and so on. Hell, my Mac unlocks simply when I have my Apple Watch near by. In the end, I probably use the Mac fingerprint key the most.
One functionality that still requires manually typing a password is using sudo from command line. Did you know, however, that you can instead require the fingerprint key instead of typing out your password?
# Open the sudo utility
sudo vi /etc/pam.d/sudo
# Add the following as the first line
auth sufficient pam_tid.so
Whether or not you'd prefer to type it out or simply use the fingerprint is obviously personal preference. Since you expect to be be typing in a command line, moving your finger to touch the key is probably not very efficient. If you do want to use fingerprint, however, here you go!
![Welcome to My New Office]()
My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...
![9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos]()
As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us. Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos. Another technology available...
![spellcheck Attribute]()
Many useful attributes have been provided to web developers recently: download, placeholder, autofocus, and more. One helpful older attribute is the spellcheck attribute which allows developers to control an elements ability to be spell checked or subject to grammar checks. Simple enough, right?
![Create a Dynamic Flickr Image Search with the Dojo Toolkit]()
The Dojo Toolkit is a treasure chest of great JavaScript classes. You can find basic JavaScript functionality classes for AJAX, node manipulation, animations, and the like within Dojo. You can find elegant, functional UI widgets like DropDown Menus, tabbed interfaces, and form element replacements within...
First you need to make the file writable (it is not by default). And you need to do this after every macOS update, because macOS updates reset the file content.
Nice trick. Unfortunately, on Big Sur, at least, it pops up the touch id alert to use it only when the session is terminated, so it’s not useful.
But it is read-only!
As the co-author of sudo, I am amused :)
No need to make it writable when editing it with vi, you just add a
!to the save and exit command (:wq!) and it will save it corectly – it will even preserve the read only state of the file.Works nicely on Big Sur for me, it pops up the touch id alert, I touch and sudo all the things =)
Is there a way to make sudo work with the Apple Watch as well?
You can also:
*browse to the folder using finder,
*edit the file with vscode, or any other code editor
*save it to desktop
*delete original file
*and place the edited
same with nano you don’t need to make it writable.
You may want to update this for Sonoma – or simple add a pointer to https://0xmachos.com/2023-10-01-Touch-ID-sudo/