[Bug 615239] Re: Every Wi-Fi disconnection is treated as an authentication error

[Phill]

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.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/615239

Title:
  Every Wi-Fi disconnection is treated as an authentication error

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