[eimrine]

You're doing two-factor authentication wrong because of not allowing me to use a single factor only (maybe I do not want to check e-mail and/or to carry smartphone with me and/or your website has too miserable value to me to take care about it).

[alias_neo]

I see you're being downvoted, but I see your point. Twitter has so little value to me, I don't see the point in requiring the extra security (for me).

I guess if you're some sort of public figure it might be, but selling blue badges to anyone kinda destroyed any credibility it had as a platform for those people.

[john_the_writer]

I have a pile of accounts that I really don't care about. I joined a harmonica group about 10 years ago. My password is something like asdf1234, because really if someone pretends to be FAKE_NAME_123 on a harmonica site, I'm cool with it.

Twitter is about there for me. If someone took over my account, Meh. I'd just create a new one. It's not tied to a real email anyway. I actually think I'm on my 3rd one now. Because I forgot which email I used to sign up.

[eimrine]

I remember the good old days when a lot of forums used to have a test/test account, and I also used to register some accounts with "test" login and "test" passwords for the sake of convenience for future folks who obviously will be wanting just to download something and forget about the website.

[fmajid]

BugMeNot.com

[sam_lowry_]

As a 2nd reason not to use 2FA is the "privatization of authentication".

Previously you had only the login and the password. Now, you need a phone and likely probably an app on the phone.

This whole push for 2FA is actually a push against individual password managers where users generate long cryptographically secure passwords.

[kemotep]

Bitwarden, and keepassxc, support adding TOTP tokens to an account entry. Allowing you to only use the password manager for authentication, no secondary device or application necessary.

[eimrine]

The world is too complicated for me to learn about how TOTP works, who supports it, how smartphones work, how password manager works, etc. All I want is an ability to use login/password with neither extra knowledge nor extra property nor having extra installed software (cookies, password manager) on the computer I am accessing the website from. Let 2FA will remain for those who really want it as it was 10 years ago.

[kemotep]

And that is important. Usability and simplicity is important for adoption. Every security layer we add does in fact strip away a layer of convenience.

In my opinion, learning to use a password manager has effectively eliminated dozens if not hundreds of passwords and user names that I would have had to remember and all I need to remember is my one password manager password and everything gets copied and pasted in automatically. Even easier on my phone with FaceID unlocking the vault.

But it is still a complication and disruption to previous sign in flows that I had to adapt to and maintain.

[eimrine]

> learning to use a password manager has effectively eliminated dozens if not hundreds of passwords

Generating passwords properly gets rid of need of any password manager while each password keeps being unique. It is useful if most of my devices for internets don't have any password manager implemented (example - any Blackberry/Symbian/Opera Mini)

[catmanjan]

The problem is these platforms double as identity providers so your twitter hacked can give access to other websites - it’s crazy that this was ever a thing

[megous]

That's still often times an optional feature, so if you don't want to use it as IDP, you may not want to opt in to 2FA.

[magicalhippo]

Ubisoft's UPlay tries to get me to sign up for 2-factor every now and then. For some it might be a good idea, if they have a large library and maybe use their account on internet cafes and such.

But they have a "Skip" button which so far works just fine. And I'm very happy it's there. So regardless of other merits, at least Ubisoft did that right with UPlay.

[EGreg]

When we were implementing blockchain-based voting, we assumed that since people trust banking apps with their money, they should be able to trust a crypto wallet with their vote.

But the biggest security flaw, it turns out, is systemic, not individual: people simply don’t care about securing their one measly vote as much as they care about securing $100,000 in their bank.

So while people were motivated to secure large individual balances, they were not motivated to secure their votes.

Which is why we have to force people to confirm their votes on another device, so that Apple or Google couldn’t theoretically steal the election by lying to you about who you voted for, let alone some random website like stackoverflow (which people trust in their moderator elections etc.)

It turns out that this is also necessary for Web3 — the current state of security is dismal, the vast majority of people don’t actually check they are interfacing with the right contract or calling the right method or sending the right parameters before they hit “Submit” to sign the transaction. So even there, people have to be forced to double-check the details on another device, depending on the value of the transaction.

For more info see my article from 2020: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...

[eimrine]

How do you imagine a blockchain-based voting but still a secret one? Everything is totally visible in any blockchain.

[EGreg]

Personally, I think we will move beyond blockchains. There are new technologies out there (DAG, HashGraph, and our own: Intercloud). There is also "sidetree protocol" that is used to secure Merkle trees with a blockchain, used by Microsoft's DID-compliant new ION for identity, and also I think by bluesky. But at the moment, Blockchain is widespread, kind of like PHP is widespread.

Polygon is probably going to be the winning provider of the space: https://community.intercoin.app/t/polygon-overtakes-ethereum... (although there are smaller ones, such as Arbitrum, Cardano)

I imagine that, in the future, we will simply have an "embarrassingly parallel" set of append-only logs, which is already possible with projects like Hypercore. And we will run consensus with those.

As for your question - the way you have secret voting is by using ring signatures. (Monero has ring signatures.) You just have to indicate that you're part of a group, and that you used your one vote, but it doesn't say who you are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

This was known since 2004, and doesn't require blockchains in fact: https://eprint.iacr.org/2004/281.pdf

A blockchain-based way would be to use a mixer (like Tornado Cash does) to mix up the tokens so each person still has exactly 1 but now it's harder to trace who has which one.

[plaguepilled]

This is the unfortunate truth about 2FA. While it significantly improves security, it is significantly less ergonomic than passwords (which are already sucky). It is also a problem when phones are, for whatever reason, not ideal for the work environment.

[chromanoid]

I totally agree.

But I also hate to add a password for each shitty website. I also don't want to connect an account via e.g. OIDC with any of my important accounts. I think there is a product or at least a new common mechanic somewhere in this mess.

[shortcake27]

Passkeys solve exactly your complaints. They’re being pushed heavily by Apple and Google, so very soon you’ll be able to sign up for sites without having to set a password + MFA.

[chromanoid]

But won't this just use Google Sign In in the end. This will give the shitty website at least my OpenId data from Google and enables social engineering with my important account?

[cyberbanjo]

In that case, doesn't your password manager support TOTP?

[alias_neo]

You missed their point, they might not want to carry a smartphone and 2FA requires you to _have_ something.

[j-pb]

You missed their point, accessing a website also requires you to have _something_, namely a device with a browser. If you have a device with a browser, then you have a device with a password manager.

Unless you only access that site via public infrastructure like a library, but that might not be infrastructure that you want confidential information to run over, because everybody and the milkman has access to it. And even then, 1Password for example also has an online version that you can access in those cases.

[eimrine]

> You missed their point, accessing a website also requires you to have _something_, namely a device with a browser. If you have a device with a browser, then you have a device with a password manager.

My point from the root of this tree was that I do not want to make a shit travel (github asks me to prove identiny by mail > gmail asks me to prove my identity by phone > my phone is somewhere else because I am not addicted to it) just to have an ability to use my github from web-interface. If I can successfully use my bitcoins without any 2fa/totp security theater than github is just shitting me with no good reason for me and for my helloworlds collection.

Probably just saving cookies solves the problem of the shit travel, but since every few hours session of browsing makes me to store tens megabytes of cookies with no value to me (except of not un-logging from github) I use to clear all cookies every time I close my browser.

[chromanoid]

You are probably not lazy enough ;). I even hate to generate a password for a site. Having to open an authenticator app is too much of a hassle to be worth it for many sites. And it doesn't really make sense if the second factor is available on the same device...

[charcircuit]

2FA is about _proving_ you have something. For someone else to prove they have that same thing they have to physically steal it from you and possess it at the time of authentication.

[b112]

No, you missed the point that the point was pointing to.

A paasword manager is also "your brain". A website can be happy with just a password.

For crying out loud, people don't need 2fa for a knitting forum!

[sigio]

The password manager being 'your brain' implies that you have only a hand-full of passwords... my brain has no way of remembering 1000+ passwords and logins, while I prefer to use random usernames and passwords. Sure, I don't need 2fa for a knitting forum, but I still need something to remember my login and password... try to never re-use either.

[b112]

I have two categories of passwords. One for knitting forum class, and one for password manager class.

No, it isn't a crisis if someone gets my credentials to the knitting forum, the pics of acrons forum, and the local 'reserve space at the county pool' website... all in one go.

I can just change them all at once, from the letter 'a' to the letter 'b'.

[oneeyedpigeon]

> If you have a device with a browser, then you have a device with a password manager.

I dispute that. Does the Nintendo Switch have a password manager?

[j-pb]

Yes. 1Password works via the browser as I mentioned.

[eimrine]

I would not trust and/or bind to online services that much.

[masklinn]

Hell you can literally run TOTP via pen and paper if you want to (though you probably need to compute it a few windows in advance, especially with the hmac_sha1).

[eimrine]

The world is too complicated already to care that much about some insignificant websites.