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The "email is authentication" pattern

rubenerd.com

271–280 of 474 posts

Re: The "email is authentication" pattern

#271

At this point why not just pass a one-time url link to your email address, and have it be a single click to login? Have it expire within 10 mins if not used, and be one-time use disposable. Still, anyone who has the link initially should be able to login with your account - but it's only accessible from your email. Obliterates all sense of security beyond the email account itself, but that's where we're at anyway. Do…

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Re: The "email is authentication" pattern

#272
Wow, that's awful. So they abuse "forgot your password" as a login method, with the added obstacle of having to come up with a random password every time. And they don't see any problem with it. My hunch is that all these people are very non-technical users.

Re: The "email is authentication" pattern

#276
post #3

Email accounts are the highest common denominator in online authentication. Phones are competitive, but people lose phones. Phone numbers are more common and durable, but the security of phone numbers is leagues below that of a flagship provider email account. It makes sense that so many authentication flows work this way. When designing a "fantasy football" alternate authentication system for the Internet, start wit…

Government provided digital IDs would solve a lot of this. Yes, they may have their own problems, but outsourcing the action of identifying individuals to the government seems valuable and less prone to "lock outs" like Google and friends.

identification is different from authentication. But authentication at least as a backstop, can generally be decently outsourced to government.

Not so much in the US though. They have no national registry of what citizens actually exist.

Re: The "email is authentication" pattern

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remembering passwords is easy this is just just convoluted and stupid.

Since you wouldn't want to reuse passwords how is it to remember them?

Base password plus company name or initials. One password mutated into infinite variations that are easy to remember. This has been working fine for me for at least 15 years.

Re: The "email is authentication" pattern

#278
This one is easy:

First of all, 'real' people do not use password managers, and they feel a slight suspicion towards the browser 'remember password' dialog so rhey decline.

They also have some boomer uncle that told them 'never to write down passwords' for the days where people post-it them to the monitor in shared office spaces.

They also know 'not to reuse passwords' because if one site gets powned your password for everything is out there.

So they develop a heuristic for mutating their 'master' password depending on the site or app, only to get thwarted by insane (not an exaggeration) password requirement rules.

So they have to deviate from their heuristic, and will not remember the password they had to make up on the spot next time around, so a reset password email it is.

Bonus: they make up a new password, omly to be informed they can not reuse a previously used password. XD

Re: The "email is authentication" pattern

#279
post #3

Email accounts are the highest common denominator in online authentication. Phones are competitive, but people lose phones. Phone numbers are more common and durable, but the security of phone numbers is leagues below that of a flagship provider email account. It makes sense that so many authentication flows work this way. When designing a "fantasy football" alternate authentication system for the Internet, start wit…

>Phone numbers are more common and durable, but the security of phone numbers is leagues below that of a flagship provider email account.

With the - "we banned your account for no reason, and you have no way to appeal and we don't even tell you why we banned you" flagship provider email account caveat.

Re: The "email is authentication" pattern

#280
post #187

I hadn't realised until reading this, that I use this exact method for Best Buy. Not intentionally though - I have my password stored in 1Password, so I know it's correct, yet every time I try to purchase something through bestbuy.com I trip some sort of ATO protection that falsely claims my password is invalid. I'm entirely willing to believe it's something on my side (ad blocker, local DNS blacklisting, etc.) but a…

> Not intentionally though - I have my password stored in 1Password, so I know it's correct, yet every time I try to purchase something through bestbuy.com I trip some sort of ATO protection that falsely claims my password is invalid. Are you sure it's not a maxlength mismatch? It is very common to have the "change password" field to have a different (or no) maxlength and then have the login page have a different max…

I know a few sites, one of them being Spotify, that will lock your account based on "suspicious activity", lie that your password is invalid, and force you to reset your password.
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