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Use Touch ID for sudo on Mac
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Use Touch ID for sudo on Mac

By David Walsh on March 1, 2021  

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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!

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Discussion

 1. Luka

    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.

     
 2. Yohann Paris

    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.

     
 3. Mehdi Abbassi

    But it is read-only!

     
 4. Robert Coggeshall

    As the co-author of sudo, I am amused :)

     

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