pfSense

Copying note here from Github:

I seem to recall there was a specific reason we allowed the password to be empty. There was an auth use case which required it at some point, but I can't find notes about it anywhere now. I do see 7304c0234042868d91ab484d839a8c69087871be ( #3633 ) but that case is blank user but filled in password.

That same issue with being blocked waiting for auth can happen if the username is blank as well as the password, if the server requires user auth, so it's not something we can always prevent. We do add auth-retry nointeract which is supposed to prevent this. But the user can override that by checking "Do not retry connection when authentication fails".

PR has been merged. Thanks!

Tested in
2.5.0-DEVELOPMENT (amd64)
built on Sun Sep 20 06:59:15 EDT 2020
FreeBSD 12.2-PRERELEASE

As expected, the password requirement still exists at boot, but there is now an informational warning urging users who will not enter a username or password here to use the Do not retry connection when authentication fails option.

Marking the ticket resolved.