It was reported [1] that accountsservice invokes usermod with the -p parameter when calling SetPassword(), which can leak encrypted passwords locally (being that they are briefly visible via ps).

As noted in the upstream bug:

The relevant code is in src/user.c in the user_change_password_authorized_cb() function:

        argv[0] = "/usr/sbin/usermod";
        argv[1] = "-p";
        argv[2] = strings[0];
        argv[3] = "--";
        argv[4] = user->user_name;
        argv[5] = NULL;

strings[0] has been set to the crypted password in user_set_password(). The crypted password has been passed from the client (ie: gnome-control-center).

This has not yet been corrected upstream.


[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55000