Very few things on the internet and computer actually need accounts. Everything requiring a login is a cancer.
Yes and no in most cases it is used to limit misuse somewhat but i absolutely agree that its taking over hand. God bless trashmails.
Password manager users living life on easy mode.
And then…
The password manager can’t fill the form. You’ve got to change your 10-word, unique passphrase because it’s 3 months old. And you have to verify with a text.
Oh and then you have to type it in on your TV with a remote and on-screen keyboard.
More people should use passkeys
Passkeys get undeserved hate
nah, too cumbersome and mistic
Magic link is lazy 2fa.
Implement TOTP support, you lazy fucks.
What’s the 2nd factor? Email and what else?
But you know what’s the safest way for us to keep your password safe? Not asking for one to begin with. By not creating a password with us you have no risk of it leaking, and we don’t have to deal with the responsibility of keeping it secure. The sign in link is going to your email, which presumably is protected with two-factor authentication, if you have it set up (which you should!).
https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/
They had a follow up later too (paywall)
Magic link only is the wirst kind of login systems. However, I don’t know any big real companies that use this.
If you don’t like passwords, just use passkeys.Slack (except when with SSO). You have to go out of your way to find the settings page outside of the client to set a password.
Wasn’t passkeys basically “passwords, but Google has control of them”?
Not even close.
Passkey is a generic technology not specific to any vendor. While there are a few versions of it, the long story short is it uses an encryption key you have to authenticate you rather than a password. This makes phishing extremely difficult if not impossible.
There’s lots of passkey implementations. All the major browsers have one built in with their included password managers. Most good password managers like BitWarden or 1Password also support pass keys. And if you want to be extra secure, the passkey can be an actual hardware token like a YubiKey.
So yeah you see Google pushing passkeys a lot, and if you use Google password manager it will store your pass keys. But you also see Apple pushing it, and Microsoft also.
dont think so. what i gatherd passkeys is a public/private key scheme, much like pubkey auth in ssh logins.
Phew!
Its still just a single factor if some body steals your private key.
Its never transmitted, can be stored in HSMs. Anything that’s handled wrong is unsafe
Steals it from your system I meant. Which has even happened to security pros.
Yes, buts it’s not something that can be easily guessed or found on a post it on the monitor
True dat. But if they compromise your computer the first thing the look for is key files.
Like my ssh keys are in a root permission file. Protected from general sight, but if somebody compromises my PC with a CVE on then goodbye keys.
At least with hardware key it is removable and requires a button press.
So accessing becomes physical access or quantum computer cracking
Booking.com (at least in Germany) only useagic links for some time now. I hate it.
Home depot does
On the other end, there is an excessive use of 2FA with systems for whom the concept of SSO seems to be a foreign thing. It’s also sort of funny that 2FA can just mean using a TOTP capable password manager, reverting it back to one factor.
It’s not actually reduced to one factor, just a single point of failure. If their password manager gets taken it’s a problem, however the generated TOTP is worthless in 1 min. So this will protect the login from cases where the password is known like a compromised website or a reused password.
If the site is compromised, then the hackers could have stolen the TOTP secrets as well as the passwords. How do you think the site verifies TOTP codes? If you reuse passwords while using a password manager, you are asking for it, though.
A full hack of every part of the service is not the only way a user’s password could get known to an attacker. Could be MiTM, could be typo-squatted, etc
If a site is that compromised no measure of auth is gonna help, so little use worrying about it.
A lot of the technology you use to connect over VPNs or over the Internet already addresses MitM. If it’s typo-squatted, you are sort of using password managers wrong. You do have the option of setting up TOTP elsewhere like on your phone authenticator so the point of failure isn’t on your side, I just think it’s sort of funny how easily you can make it be one.
But if a password manager is compromised then doesn’t the attacker also get the TOTP key which is what generates the codes in the first place?
It wouldn’t matter if it expires in one minute because they’ll have the token to generate the next code, as well as now knowing the password.
That makes it a single point of failure yes, and the rest of the comment you’re replying to goes into detail on what it does protect from even if both passwd and TOTP are in the password manager
Sorry i misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you were saying that if the password manager was compromised then the attackers would have only 1 minute to make use of the tokens before they change.
That depends on the manager. Good ones won’t have access to your stuff outside of an encrypted blob. Still, it’s generally better to use a separate authenticator.
This. This so much. Password+Totp based login is just two passwords where one is more annoying to use.
Not if your TOTP codes are generated by another device, then the attacker needs your password, plus the device holding the key for TOTP. If you use it on your phone and authenticator is your phone then a theif has everything when they steal your phone.
Hardware key for TOTP is a better 2FA method as its totally separate from your PC or phone
As long as the default recommendation is to use authenticator apps on your main device I’ll see this as a “could be good if implemented correctly, which it isn’t, so it isn’t good”
If you can get at a password by hacking a website, I wouldn’t be holding out hope that they couldn’t then steal the TOTP secret.
I mean yes everything is hackable. Thankfully the hardware key supports FIDO where there is a public / private pair with private locked on the hardware. Not enough services support this though.
So threat is being targeted and having somebody steal the hardware key.
I love FIDO logins and next to fucking no one implements them :(
Absolutely 100%. Click login, accept passkey signature, logged in. This is the way to go
And when they do they only offer them as the second factor.
Yes, let me first input my password (from a password manager), the let me approve with a passkey that is meant to make my password not necessary.
But email based login: FUCK THAT SHIT.
I actually prefer using FIDO2 as a second factor only cos I use YubiKey which can only store 100 RKs.
Depending on the security needs using hardware based security as a second factor while still requiring some other form of auth is not actually a bad idea.
What are they?
Public key cryptography tied to physical hardware, so if you lose your phone / usb key, you need to use your backup recovery code; a fairly short one time password that negates the security benefits of Fido in one easy step.
It can also use biometrics, but that requires every device you log in on to have biometric readers.
Or you could use multiple fido key’s as backups
Also This strange trend to split username and password on to two separate pages, or only showing the password field after confirming the username
That’s there to support routing to an identity provider for SAML2 SSO.
Not that strange. Different users may belong to different groups which may have different authentication backends. The associated authentication method is brought up once a username has been provided.
if your choice of api route directly affects your auth flow something is very wrong.
You can do that as part of an OAuth workflow. You don’t need to have them on separate pages for that to happen.
Yes, but, it also lets them slurp up email addresses. Routing users is legit tho.
- Username
- Password
- MFA
- Do the whole process all over again because the remember this device is on step 2 and it’s impossible to go back
Bonus stage 0: special login URL decided to crap out, and going back to any point in history automatically redirects to the error page that you can’t use to log in, so you need to keep going back and trying to copy the URL before it redirects becausw Firefox interprets pressing “stop” as “do whatever you want idk”
Fucking aws…
You forgot step 2.5: incorrectly identifying stoplights 6 times in a row.
Oh fuck, the stone piles -thing is the worst of those. Tiny images, badly generated so you can’t see shit, multiple rounds that have six or so images each round, you can’t make a single mistake, and you get to know did you make any mistakes only after completing all of the rounds. It’s straight up abuse
Once I had to try over five times and still kept failing, so I just gave up. I guess I’m not a human anymore
I actually like seeing those, when I have time, because I assume they are training ai with it and using my selections as tagging data. Pick all the cars: nope, everything but cars.
I’m probably the reason you fail, because I’m poisoning the data and reducing the confidence scores for the tags.
I remember when doing those captcha felt like improving computer science and that was a positive thing, teaching computers to see. How quickly we’ve fallen.
It’s a whole mini game sometimes. I hate them with every fiber of my being.
It took me years to learn that you’re supposed to do them very slowly. Otherwise it will keep bothering you to fill out more. Pretend you are 80 years old and you’re good to go on your first try.
That ones because users like choice. They need to look up who you are to know how you’ve chosen to authenticate. At least, that’s how it started. Some could be doing it because the big kids are, but that’s why the big kids do.
And they support choice because businesses want to use their login infrastructure and refuse to share. So you enter “[email protected]” and it forwards you to your institutional login.And the auto-submitting TOTP entry form where you’re apparently not allowed to make a typo. And obscuring the TOTP number like it’s a password or state secret.
This is because of Enterprise Single Sign On. You can try this for yourself by going to https://gmail.com/ and enter the email of a public person at a large org, for example the CEO of Doordash (
tony@doordash.com). After you enter the email, you get sent to Doordash’s employee portal to authenticate. Based on the email you provide, Gmail has to figure out if you need to provide a password to gmail itself or if the email authenticates another way.It’s not like you can’t add a “Log in with your company’s SSO” button to the form. That works just fine and at least Microsoft does something like that.
No it doesn’t work fine, because it confuses people, and provides the potential for working-around SSO.
Not sure I’d take design inspiration from Microsoft of all places. Also https://login.live.com/ has the same workflow email -> continue -> password. Not sure where you’re seeing Log in with SSO option.
I see the Login with SSO option all over the place. Of course, that assumes the users actually understand what that means, and they know whether or not they need to click it.
And remembers which one they choose when registering.
Zoom has it, for example.
My company uses Entra ID (or whatever they’ve renamed it to this week) and it’s a pretty common sight in our login flow. I think our SharePoint instance does it so it should be something MS does.
Of course it all depends on w how the company configures it.
Ok, I think I get what you’re saying. You mean have a different form input without the password, like how it’s done here: https://eu.app.orcasecurity.io/login? I guess that’s one way to do it, but it’s not really intuitive from a user perspective, since the first thing you see is a password field, and then think you don’t have access because you don’t have a password. This one comes to mind because I have had to tell people to click the tab for the email only field, not email and password.
I also often see implementations where there’s a first step where you have to select how to log in. It’s an extra click but very clear (and usually one of the options is some form of SSO where that one click fully logs you in if you already have a session open).
Came here to say that! For the love of God, stop with this nonsense!
1Password handles this gracefully
The best I’ve seen was yesterday where a website had the log-in button greyed out after the password manager filled my creds in.
So I had to manually click both the email and password field. Just click them. Then it enabled the log-in button.
So someone took their time to write a piece of JS that said “If the user hasn’t focused both fields at least once, no login”. Literally why? Extra code that does nothing useful.
I was hoping passkeys would be the solution to this madness, but it seems to me the entire spec gives too much power to the OS Makers and too little to the users because “mUh AtTtEsTatIoN” so now I don’t know anymore
So someone took their time to write a piece of JS that said “If the user hasn’t focused both fields at least once, no login”. Literally why? Extra code that does nothing useful.
If anything, 30 seconds in Greasemonkey should fix that one (either blocking the function that is doing it, or manually firing click events on the fields).
I’ve definitely run into that. Even more frustrating is when there was one particular site that forced me to actually delete the last character of my password and then retype it. Just focusing in the field wasn’t enough, I had to actually send it a keystroke. And Ctrl-V to paste the password in manually didn’t count. I suppose typing a random character at the end and then deleting it would have worked too.
When ctrl+v is disabled to “prevent brute force bots” or something ridiculous
that’s when I grab my trusty Don’t Fuck With Paste extension
I used to have this problem with the payroll website ADP! So cursed
I’ve seen this a stupid number of times. I wish I could remember which websites…
It’s not perfect but will break many bot logins and people trying different logins from data leaks.
Bots will just use the underlying endpoint.
My utitlies website doesn’t let you login if the password field is autofilled by the browser. Whatever Angular-based form validation they are using doesn’t play nice with Firefox’s saved password feature. You have to manually type something in the password field, so I always add and remove a space from the password.
I sent an email to their support, hoping they would fix it, but they just responded saying that they can’t reproduce it.
Well, I can reproduce it. I even told you how. That sounds like a skill issue.
lol nice, this is one tech thing I have not complained about even though I hit it a few times a year
Oh, it gets worse. I’ve had some where I have to enter a character into the boxes before it would figure its shit out…
They inevitably didn’t write it for that reason. They wrote it to say the field is invalid until the user changes it to be valid after someone landed on the page holding the enter key down and instantly locked themselves out after submitting the form 50 times in 3 seconds.
Unless you know otherwise, it’s easy to think that “form interaction” is the same as “form changed”, and one of those is much easier to check.I’m unsure what you mean about passkeys. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention significant concessions to os makers and I’m pretty tuned in on the topic.
the user must be a human, so i imagine that being the rationale.
alternatives to passwords are just excuses to harvest info
Not if it comes to hardware-based passkeys I would argue
true, but i would also argue that’s a much less utilised alternative. most people don’t even know what that is even though it’s a great redundancy.
It is quite normal to ask for an email address at registration even when using password based authentication.
*it has been become quite normalized
No email would be fine for most people, but then there would be the small number of folks who will cry all hell when they forget their passwords and/or secret questions and can’t get in…
It was more or less the default many moons ago, then just a username became more common, now it is back to email or some third party login
Or worse:
Use email link -> use password instead
Enter password
Now enter the code that we sent you your email…
2 factor authentication, only when you feel like it.
They might as well be piping the password to
/dev/null
God I hate those stupid magic links. They’re WAAAAYYY slower than just using my password manager.
AND they kinda contribute to locking you into Big Tech. I sometimes have problems with those stupid links because I don’t have a Gmail account. Somewhere along the stupid chain there’s probably some stupid check that delays or blackholes emails to non-big-tech domains.
Based.
Email is terrible. It’s an unreliable communication system. You cannot depend on sent emails arriving in the recipient’s mailbox—even the spam folder.
People incorrectly assume that all emails at least get to their spam folder. They don’t. There are multiple levels of filters that prevent most emails from ever making it that far because most email traffic is bots blasting phishing links, scams, and spam. Nobody wants phishing and scam emails, but the blocks that prevent those are being used by big tech to justify discriminating against small mail servers.
I can’t remember the site, now, but I literally couldn’t log into one this week because the email never arrived.
I can’t remember the site, now, but I literally couldn’t log into one this week because the email never arrived.
Well, email allows you to solve that issue by self-hosting. But what you can’t solve is that if you do self-host, gmail will drop your emails to spam or just discard them completely, just because it feels like it, even if you do the whole dance with DMARC and have used the domain for a good few years. It’s frustrating as shit.
I had an email never arrive because I used Firefox for Linux. It worked on my phone in a different browser. God knows what went on there. I suppose their website never really registered I even made a request from my desktop even though it told me the email was on the way. Really strange.
HEY BUT DO YOU WANT TO USE A PASSCODE?? PASSCODE! PASSCODE! USE THE PASSCODE! -_-
Yeah what the hell is up with that one? Seems so sketchy
Passkeys are okay, but your browser and OS want you to use them because you can’t just take a passkey to another platform, you have to create a new one, and it’s a pain in the ass.
It’s a lock-in gimmick latching on to a real useful solution.
Password managers can hold Passkeys now and they’re portable. Bitwarden stores all of mine, use them on any machine.
It’s good but for some reason I can’t use them on my degoogled android phone. Doesn’t pop up to select… It thinks I want to use a yuibkey or other device.
Yeh, I have passkeys in bitwarden.
I get it. Once they become ubiquitous, you click “login” your password manager prompts you to select account, and you are in.
No password that can be leaked, incorrectly stored, brute forced.
Corporations can pre-register company service passkeys for new users.
It’s like mTLS, except staged.While true, it still means you’re locked into only being able to log in from a browser that has the password manager extension installed and logged in. Sometimes I want to log in from another machine, or another OS, or another browser, or even an incognito window that doesn’t have access to my extensions.
That’s what hardware keys are for. Even the cheap lines of fido USB keys (ca $20) can safe passkeys. And your phone can too.
You can do that without an extension. There’s a bunch of different protocols that let you, for example, use your phone as the authenticator.
You can log in with your phone on a computer you’ve never used before by scanning a QR code and credentials never leave your device.
KeepassDX as well.
My passkeys are tied to my phone, which I use via the browser and OS. I keep them in my password manager running on the phone. My password manager supports the open spec for securely migrating credentials between vendors.
It may be difficult to believe but they want you to use them because they’re legitimately significantly better.
Users are silly. They blame Microsoft for bad passwords. They blame Google for forgotten passwords. They blame Facebook when they click on a phishing link. They blame apple when apple “lets” someone who they gave their password to see their pictures. They blame apple when they don’t let the user in just because they forgot their password and every recovery mechanism.
Everyone involved has a significant issue with passwords because they cost them user satisfaction, credibility, or money directly. The reason cross vendor transfer has been slow is because everyone wants to be the leader, since if everyone follows your lead you get to make it work better with your stuff.
That’s false. My passkeys sync to my password manager and are available on all my devices
Ok that makes a lot of sense. It definitely seems like it’s more for them than it is for the user’s “convenience”
Passkeys are fine. It’s just MTLS but by marketers (if by passcode you mean passkeys. otherwise, what’s a passcode?)
