I think the registration pattern should be - user enters email to register. email is sent to that email with a link to verify. user clicks link. user gets email with username and password to login in to the profile created for them.
Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
291–300 of 816 posts
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#292The attack pattern is: 1) User goes to BAD website and signs up. 2) BAD website says “We’ve sent you an email, please enter the 6-digit code! The email will come from GOOD, as they are our sign-in partner.” 3) BAD’s bots start a “Sign in with email one-time code” flow on the GOOD website using the user’s email. 4) GOOD sends a one-time login code email to the user’s email address. 5) The user is very likely to trust…
> Passkeys is the way to go. Password manager support for passkeys is getting really good. I set up a passkey for github at some point, and apparently saved it in Chrome. When I try to "use passkey for auth" with github, I get a popup from Chrome asking me to enter my google password manager's pin. I don't know what that pin is. I have no way of resetting that pin - there's nothing about the pin in my google profile,…
Passkeys are the pinnacle of bad UX. It just works, until the user tries to switch devices, accounts or platforms. The slogan of passkeys should be something like "I don't have a password, it usually just works, but now I changed X and it doesn't work anymore". Even worse is hardware-based 2FA built into smartphones (also FIDO), as you lose your phone in a lake and now you can't access anything anymore.
The way to go is an encrypted password manager + strong unique random passwords + TOTP 2FA. It's human-readable. Yes, that makes it susceptible to phishing, but it also provides very critical UX that makes it universal and simple.
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#293The attack pattern is: 1) User goes to BAD website and signs up. 2) BAD website says “We’ve sent you an email, please enter the 6-digit code! The email will come from GOOD, as they are our sign-in partner.” 3) BAD’s bots start a “Sign in with email one-time code” flow on the GOOD website using the user’s email. 4) GOOD sends a one-time login code email to the user’s email address. 5) The user is very likely to trust…
> Passkeys is the way to go.
No, please, not as long as attestation is in the spec. I firmly believe that passkeys are intended to facilitate vendor lock-in and reduce the autonomy of end users.
Frankly, I do not trust any passkey implementation as much as I trust a GPG-encrypted text file.
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
She follows same reset flow as before. Passkeys are identical in this respect to the passwords of yore.
Passkeys are more like 2FA, and many services disable password resets without 2FA if it's enabled.
Do you have any examples of such services? How do they handle the lost phone case? Tell people to go pound stand?
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#295Also super annoying if you haven’t set up email on a device (like my iPad), now I have back and forth with my phone instead of going through my password manager.
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#296Four times a day, I get an email notification that someone requested a password reset for my Microsoft account, which gives me a six-digit number to recover my account. So every day, an attacker has four shots in 1,000,000 of stealing my account by just guessing the number. They've been doing this for years. If the attacker's doing this to thousands of accounts - which I'm sure they are - they're going to be stealing…
I get it too! I always assumed it was some hangover from that time I had to use crosses self Microsoft teams.
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft Entra ID goes out of its way to enforce attestation for FIDO 2 keys. The protocol normally allows you to omit the attestation, but they worked around an extra call after a successful registration flow that sends you to an error page if your FIDO2 passkey isn't from one of these large approved vendors: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authenticat... I found out by trying to prototype my own F…
To defend Redmond here, Entra is an enterprise system. If the company you work for or are interfacing with wants to enforce attestation, that's their business. B2C I would expect more latitude on requiring attestation.
Don’t put in place systems which encourage lock-in, even at the B2B level.
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#298The attack pattern is: 1) User goes to BAD website and signs up. 2) BAD website says “We’ve sent you an email, please enter the 6-digit code! The email will come from GOOD, as they are our sign-in partner.” 3) BAD’s bots start a “Sign in with email one-time code” flow on the GOOD website using the user’s email. 4) GOOD sends a one-time login code email to the user’s email address. 5) The user is very likely to trust…
The problems of Passkeys are more nuanced than just losing access when a device is lost (which actually doesn't need to happen depending on your setup). The biggest problem are attestations, which let services block users who use tools that give them more freedom. Passkeys, or more generally challenge-response protocols, could easily have been an amazing replacement for passwords and a win-win for everyone. Unfortuna…
Why would BigTech care about the dozens of users using an open source password manager? What’s their gain from preventing these people from logging in? They love money and don’t care about user freedom, sure. But they’ve shown no evidence of hating user freedom on principle.
Every time I’ve seen them actually attack user freedom, there was an embarrassingly obvious business angle. Like Chrome’s browser attestation that was definitely not to prevent Adblock, no sir.
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#299The attack pattern is: 1) User goes to BAD website and signs up. 2) BAD website says “We’ve sent you an email, please enter the 6-digit code! The email will come from GOOD, as they are our sign-in partner.” 3) BAD’s bots start a “Sign in with email one-time code” flow on the GOOD website using the user’s email. 4) GOOD sends a one-time login code email to the user’s email address. 5) The user is very likely to trust…
> The attack pattern is: There are lots of attack patterns. That is one. I am not certain I believe it is very likely, because (a) I think "sign-in partner" is obvious bullshit, and (b) I don't understand why I would never enter a code into the wrong website. I believe it can be possible, but... > Passkeys is the way to go. ... I’d rather granny needs to visit the bank to get access to her account again, than someone…
> I am not certain I believe it is very likely, because (a) I think "sign-in partner" is obvious bullshit
It's looks almost the same as the log-in-with-big-tech flow that users are already used to.
> and (b) I don't understand why I would never enter a code into the wrong website. I believe it can be possible, but...
You enter it on the website you are trying to log into and where you initiated the action, which in this scenario is the BAD website.
Re: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are sites that send you immediately a 6 digit code just by entering your email on their sign in page, they don’t even request a password. That means you could be phished on a fake website that when you enter your email there they do it on the real site, then you receive the real good code and enter it on the fake site.
It is just the same old stuff with username & password combination. I used to duplicate websites, they looked exactly like the original, except I was storing the entered username and password combination. I did this when I was a kid. The process is the same (or very similar) with everything else that is not a password.
True, they do it to facilitate access to their site without a password, but personally I don’t like getting an email just because I entered my username to sign in (my password manager takes care of filling the form so that email with a code is unnecessary to me).