Insecure password login due to slowness

Question

Do you know the console mode password login?
First it says "Username:". Then you type the username. Then you type enter. Then it says "Password:". Then  you type the password, which isn't shown on screen.
Sometimes after you press enter after typing the username, it's slow, and I already start typing the password but instead of being not printed, the first few letters are instead shown in the terminal.
Imagine my username were bob and my password swordfish. Sometimes I type too fast and then I get the following output on the screen:
Username: bob
swPassword:
And then it says "incorrect login" because it only registered "ordfish" as the password.
The insecure thing is that the first letters of the password are visible!
Why is the computer not fast enough to immediatly register the letters I type as password after I press enter? A human on a keyboard is supposed to be much slower than even the dumbest 1MHz computer...

Answer 1

A big kick, but it seems like this (important) issue has been forgotten.
I use laptop-mode on my laptop, which spins down the hd after so many minutes of inactivity. When I need to enter the password when this is the case, i.e. login or sudo, it reproduces the password echoing issue discussed here.
After a few months of witnessing this, I have noticed that the initial command lets the hd spin up again, e.g. sudo <cmd>, and that the moment between entering the echoless password and being able to safely enter it is equal to the spin up delay. When not using laptop-mode, this issue does not occur.
As I use this laptop for presentations, it is a real security threat when several characters of your password are visible.
I can't find any relating bug reports and no forum posts, except for this one. The keywords regarding this issue are very ambiguous, however. 
The problem is not a bug of laptop-mode, as it seems to occur with heavy load too. We therefore need a change in the way functions that require passwords are processed, e.g. some sort of symbol that prevents input echo on that terminal until the security kicks in.
Edit:
Found a bug report at last: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21272
Last edited by Firestone (2010-11-05 10:20:00)