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This strikes me as the right solution, with two caveats:

• It should allow the keyboard through—or have a timeout that defaults to "yes"—if a mouse or keyboard is not already connected.

• I should have the option to disable it.

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If there's a monitor, you don't need to trust the first keyboard—just display a message with "type this [random] code to allow this keyboard."

I like this, but how do you know the keyboard layout?

My thought was that it would be an excellent, low knowledge way of figuring that out. For example, if it said type "qwerty" and it came through as "azerty", that would get you 95% of the way to having a fully functional keyboard. Mapping out the requisite keys needed to fully identify the keys could probably be done with a fairly short number of key presses for 99+% of likely keyboards.

For this case, I am assuming that the keyboard and os language are fairly compatible, at least translatable.

desktops and servers could have special "root ports" physically colored red and hidden at the back of the case that don't require permissions.

PS/2!

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