[ch0ic3]

> mitigate some attack vector?

Pretty much, if anybody can listen in on your traffic and IO is unbuffered then they can extract information about the keys pressed based on the timing between consecutive presses. There's this old LWN article: https://lwn.net/Articles/298833/

It was also discussed a while back when it was first published on undeadly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37307708

In general though if you have buffered IO you are fine since a packet is sent only when 'enter' is pressed.