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Oh, it's not like a password (where you'd want to prevent echo). The value is actually a digest of a public key -- one instance of the program prints the digest, and the user has to enter it into the other instance of the program. This is for setting up a secure P2P connection.

I may have misstated the problem above. What I really need to ensure is that a malicious output can't say "the digest is abc123" and trick the user into pasting that into the other program (when the real digest is def456).

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Just have a link that the user can click that copies the correct hash to the clipboard.
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Both ends are terminal programs.
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So side A prints out a value, side B has to input it using the user as the go between.

Hmm...

Isn't there a public key based way to avoid needing the user to do this.

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Not that I can think of, no. This is the public key based way of doing things.
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I mean the value gets encrypted or signed with a private key.
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