Using Touch ID on Macbook Pro for sudo Authentication

Full credit goes to Cabel Sasser (@cabel) on this one for sharing the original tip. I’m simply sharing it here and showing the process to prove the awesomeness of this capability.

Pro MacBook Pro Tip: have a Touch Bar with Touch ID? If you edit /etc/pam.d/sudo and add the following line to the top…

auth sufficient pam_tid.so

…you can now use your fingerprint to sudo!

— Cabel Sasser (@cabel) November 16, 2017

If you run a MacBook Pro with the Touch ID option, you have already discovered the speed at which you can authenticate for a number of GUI-driven products. Running sudo in the command line does not give you that luxury, usually.

By making a small change

First, you have to edit the /etc/pam.d/sudo file with your editor of choice. It’s a read only file and you need admin privileges to do so. Oh the irony!

I’m going to use sudo vim /etc/pam.d/sudo to open up the file. This prompts me for credentials in the terminal session, as it should:

Add the following to the first line in the file after the comment:

auth sufficient pam_tid.so

You can space it out for consistency with the other lines:

Save the file. It’s read-only, so I have to use w! to save, and then exit back to the shell and close your terminal.

Launch a new terminal session so that you have no cached sudo session credentials and try a new sudo command such as sudo vim /etc/hosts and watch the magic happen:

This should be a nice time saver for you, especially when you use complex passwords…like you should 🙂