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Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

jcarlosroldan.com

231–240 of 392 posts

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#231
post #115

Something that often gets overlooked in these discussions is the impact of all this on older people and people with intellectual disabilities. Managing all of this is annoying to an average person, but can literally be impossible for an older person with a memory disorder. It creates a lot of additional vulnerability for them, because they now need to trust someone to help them manage their accounts. It also puts a h…

I very much wish more people considered the various types of users and contexts that use their system. Many seem to be moving towards a "magic link" solution, which can be convenient but is also predicated on the user's phone or email which leaves users with a single point of failure and little additional protection or recourse if it is exploited.

While I understand the burden on organizations to protect user data, the user should have say as well. A one-size fits all solution almost always leaves users on the lower slopes of the bell curve vulnerable or frustrated.

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#232

We are going way over the top with 2FA. Why do I need to activate mandatory 2FA in services like GitHub repositories for hobby projects? It's a lot of extra effort for a questionable security improvement, and anyway, if someone impersonates me there, it's not the end of the world. If they care about end users (which my projects mostly don't even have) mark me as "unverified" or something, but let me avoid the hassle.…

> Why do I need to activate mandatory 2FA in services like GitHub repositories for hobby projects? Because your hobby-project can emerge to be the backbone of someone's multibillion dollar-business, or a small gear in a million other projects, and you will get targeted for a supply-chain-attack.

Why should a multi-billion dollar business or a million other projects trust my code simply because GitHub made me 2FA to sign in? I may well decide the next push rewrites half the project in a breaking way on a whim or get an offer for $100k to give control of the project to the bad actor or just decide I don't like big corp anyway and be the bad actor myself.

Turning providing source code into promising you'll follow other's desires on how it should be worked on is a recipe for disaster while simultaneously not really making hobby projects low risk to rely on anyways.

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dominos has the best checkout experience I ever experienced online. Nothing can beat it IMO, at least nothing I came across. Now they only sell (arguable mid) pizza, but when I order there it’s delightful (to use an overused 2023 marketing buzzword)

Their regular round pizzas are ok, but now that PizzaHut is gone, the Dominoes pan pizza is my go-to.

Pizza Hut is gone?

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#234

I find myself wondering, how much collective time is being lost these days to authentication? I mean, if you have to authenticate using your phone, you have to dig it out of your pocket, sign into the phone, read the text message or use the authenticator app, type in the code...

And how much time is being wasted on authentication when they don't accept valid credential because you cleared your cookies or changed IP or whatever?

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a happy ApplePay user, but you absolutely do have to give them your (card) information upfront through the whole adding your card in the Wallet app. That being said, I feel the parent’s viewpoint is naively idealistic, the payment industry is huge with many players and most attempts at new standards or interoperability are by people trying to get a cut of the action, no one is going to adopt a new standard unless…

> I’m a happy ApplePay user, but you absolutely do have to give them your (card) information upfront through the whole adding your card in the Wallet app. Do you actually have to give them the card? Or is it only stored somehow on the phone? I wonder how this works exactly. When I replaced my old iphone with a new one, I did the whole "transfer everything" dance. Waited around for two hours (didn't restore from iclou…

It's stored on your phone in the secure enclave.

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#236

> Gileadite soldiers used the word "shibboleth" to detect their enemies, the Ephraimites. The Ephraimites spoke in a different dialect so that they would say "sibboleth" instead. Experience : you just had to say a word. Security : there's a single word to authenticate multiple users and it can be cracked by learning how to spell it. Although that's roughly how the Wikipedia entry[0] summarises it, the actual wording…

In the Finnish civil war in 1918 the White Guard asked captives to say "one" in Finnish ("yksi"). The word starts with the wovel [y]. This is very hard to even learn to pronounce.

When the Russian speaking captives tried and failed to utter the [y] they were shot on the spot. Finnish natives got the luxury to starve often to death in concentration camps.

In WW2 the sibboleth was changed to "höyryjyrä".

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#237

I just opened a ticket with notion on mobile and plan on switching because I can’t use it for simple notes. This is the amount of steps it takes to login and you have to do it all the time: * unlock your phone * tap notion * you're logged out - avoid the big login with x sso buttons, scan for and click the little text that's black on black labeled "login here with email" * type my email out (no autofill) * tap submit…

This is the main problem - I want the ability to say "this app should be authenticated whenever my phone is unlocked" - I trust that the timeouts on my phone will protect me from the unlikely "grab" attack, and I can remotely lock it anyway.

I do NOT want to have to sign in a billion times a day, even if it's relatively quickly with FaceID or similar.

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#238
post #8

I understand the frustration with login systems, but why is the title "Passwordless: A Different Kind of Hell" if it doesn't talk about passwordless authentication, like passkeys, magic links, and biometrics?

> biometrics Biometrics are a convenience feature, not a security feature. Fingerprints are trivial to lift and replicate. Face unlocks can be fooled by pictures, or in some cases, get false positives from people that just look enough like you (which is common in some Asian countries). Even if it requires you to blink, new AI tools will easily generate a video of you looking around and blinking. But the worst part ab…

> Face unlocks can be fooled by pictures

Isn't that only Android (and maybe only older models)? Doesn't iOS use a LIDAR sensor instead of the camera?

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#239

We are going way over the top with 2FA. Why do I need to activate mandatory 2FA in services like GitHub repositories for hobby projects? It's a lot of extra effort for a questionable security improvement, and anyway, if someone impersonates me there, it's not the end of the world. If they care about end users (which my projects mostly don't even have) mark me as "unverified" or something, but let me avoid the hassle.…

Github is an unfortunate choice of example because the replies have fixated on it but there are a large number of sites that impose security cargo-culting to secure things that just don't need it. e.g. Why do I need to make an account with a password to pay a bill?

Re: Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

#240
post #115

Something that often gets overlooked in these discussions is the impact of all this on older people and people with intellectual disabilities. Managing all of this is annoying to an average person, but can literally be impossible for an older person with a memory disorder. It creates a lot of additional vulnerability for them, because they now need to trust someone to help them manage their accounts. It also puts a h…

This is getting exceptionally bad, where places like the SSA are moving to "online-only" for basically everything, and the ability to go to a local office and have someone help you is getting rarer and rarer.

And even if you can get in-person with someone, the new "secure" systems may block them from being able to help, anyway.

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