An application to show if Secure Input is enabled?

Question

I'm struggling with Secure Input Mode, since it (quite often) gets left on, because of 1password. I've asked their support and they brushed it off them by saying that 'they didn't experience that'.

The most annoying part is that I can't see if Secure Input Mode is enabled or not.

Does anyone know of a way (or an application) that makes it visible if Secure Input Mode is enabled or not?

Answer 1

I ended up going into this rabbit hole myself.

My gut-feeling told me that it was a possible race-condition between 1password and something else (maybe Alfred). But I couldn't prove it.

The problem was, that as soon as I CMD + Tab'ed, then it usually fixed the issue, so I couldn't debug it. I needed something being visible at all times, so if this annoying thing happened, that I could see straight away, what enabled SecureInput (without touching the keys).

I ended up installing TextBar, and running two scripts every 10 seconds:

Script 1: Process ID

#!/bin/bash

SID=`ioreg -l -w 0 | grep SecureInput`
if [[ "$SID" != '' ]]; then
    echo ' Secure Input is Active '
else
    echo ' Not active '
fi

Script 2: Application name

#!/bin/bash

culprit=`ioreg -l -w 0 | grep SecureInput | sed 's/ //g'`
if [ -z "$culprit" ]
then
    echo ' No culprit '
else
    echo ' ' >> ./secure_input_log.log
    echo $(date) >> ./secure_input_log.log
    echo $culprit >> ./secure_input_log.log
    echo " ${culprit:0:20} "
fi

But as I installed this setup, then problem disappeared: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Answer 2

I am going to be annoying and answer a different question from what you originally asked, but I hope the answer may help you anyway. It helped me.

This will not make it visible if Secure Input Mode is enabled, but it may help you release Secure Input quickly: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/412859/441333

Answer 3

Here is a python script and very informative and clearly written block post on how to dump the process list and find those with secure input enabled currently.

• https://alexwlchan.net/2021/04/secure-input/

Adapting the commands from there and this other post here, you can get a quick yes/no from this one command:

ioreg -l -w 0 | grep SecureInput > /dev/null  && echo "Secure On" || echo no

For me, using the Terminal.app menu to look at the status is reliable as well, but not as fast as a shell alias of the above command.