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by vel0city 2885 days ago
Having a TOTP secret would protect against theft of credentials in transit. The TOTP is only valid once, so that credential exchange is only valid once. They wouldn't be able to create any additional login sessions with the information they've attacked. However, there's a good chance if they could see that they might also be able to see a lot of other information you're exchanging with that service.
1 comments

It creates a race condition in transit - if they can use the code before you, then they win. I can intercept at the network level, but also via phishing attacks - there is no domain challenge or verification in TOTP.

I know having someone malicious get into your account multiple times vs once is likely worse, but its hard to quantify how much worse it is - and of course using that one login to change your 2FA setup would make them equivalently bad.

Not quite exactly "equivalently bad", since a user is more likely to notice a 2FA setup change than they are a phishing site's login error and then everything working as usual, but yeah, perhaps it's splitting hairs at that point.