This is Jim Knoble's implementation of the ssh-askpass program, originally called x11-ssh-askpass upstream. It is built on low-level X11 libraries, and therefore has minimal dependencies.
Other ssh-askpass programs are available, some of which may integrate better into various desktop environments.
This is handy if you want to launch an app from the menu which requires sudo. For example, on Linux Mint I added "file browser sudo" with the command line env SUDO_ASKPASS=/usr/bin/ssh-askpass sudo -A caja --no-desktop --browser %U