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by wonnage 2426 days ago
It's slightly less secure but much more convenient, which I think is worth the trade-off. Just having 2fa on means you don’t have to worry if a website has its passwords compromised, which is probably the biggest threat for most people.
1 comments

See my comments elsewhere in this thread. I’d argue that ‘having unique passwords for every site’ is much more important than 2FA when it comes to the consequences of a site’s database being compromised.

For instance, I’ll happily give you my password to ‘My Vodafone’. It’s nXewr7Vq4f)s9>ky. It really is. I don’t give a shit if their database is compromised, it doesn’t affect the rest of my life.

(I haven’t been a customer in about a decade. The login no longer works. You get the point.)

2FA adds nothing to this scenario. I should assume that an attacker who has compromised the site’s database has also compromised their OTP systems.

This is true for some 2FA methods but you can literally publish all the data for WebAuthn and it won't make any difference to the security for your users or your site. Same reason seeing the certificate for Hacker News doesn't get you any closer to successfully impersonating the site, public key cryptography.

Bad guys who steal my WebAuthn credentials for foo.example don't learn how to sign in as me on any site at all, even on foo.example. If they break into another site. bar.example and steal all their WebAuthn credentials too, they can't even correlate them to figure out who has sign-ins on both sites.