How to avoid exposing password on a serial console

I'm redirecting console to ttya via eeprom and getting it via nc -U according to the following blog post Serial Console with VirtualBox on Solaris host.
The problem seems to be an echo problem with what I type in terminal running nc.
I saw others in Google using socat but that isn't in the repositories.
I was wondering about some small script such as:

stty -echo
nc -U /tmp/xxx.pipe
stty echo

The above is awkward as I only see the command after entering it (although it does hides passwords).
But is there a better solution?

Thanks in advance.