Either by sending a code to SMS or Email, you are able to sign into your account without ever needing to or being able to add a password. Why has this become a thing recently?
Side rant:
To make it worse, SMS is incredibly insecure. Nothing should send you codes via SMS, and if you have the option to use an authenticator app, do that. It’s atrocious so many banks only have SMS as an option.
The really dumb part is, the SMS codes are literally the same authenticator algorithm, but running on their servers and sent to you via an insecure medium.
And one little lapse in not paying a cell phone bill can cause you to lose your phone number, which then means you can no longer authenticate.
this is why I don’t like it and why I often advocate that countries should provide a secure email that you can come to an office in person if you can’t get to it. People get mad as if Im suggesting it should be the only email they have but what I really want is a guaranteed thing that is made as secure as possible and allows for real in person support to make sure you can get access or stop someone that somehow got access.
I never understood why SMS is insecure, are you saying it’s easy to intercept someone’s number? How would that even work without the SIM?
Veritasium did a great video on it. Anything I can say about it will be 10x worse than that video.
Getting a replacement SIM from the phone company is often shockingly easy, just a tiny bit of social engineering. And then you have access to the number and everything that 2FA “protects”
It is but only if you are targeted. I completely disagree with people who say it’s insecure because most attacks are remote and in bulk. Which your password they can login from any browser but are stopped by the SMS code.
For the SMS code they can use mostly automated social engineering to trick a certain percentage into giving it up.
However while A SIM attack may be easy enough for a targeted individual, I don’t think it scales: they have to do work that only helps with one user. It’s too “expensive” compared to automated social engineering against a million vulnerable users
It’s all just a big “in theory” really. It’s “insecure” in that if someone knows the telco you are with, and the telco that you’re with doesn’t follow procedures to verify that a caller is who they say they are, you could have someone else steal your phone number by getting a replacement sim card sent to them.
In reality it’s nothing to worry about. Like…at all. Every telco I’ve been with sends you a sms to confirm that you requested a new SIM card, and that’s after they’ve confirmed that you are who you say you are via sending you a code on your phone number or email.
The most common way is basically calling up your phone company and pretending to be you saying you needed to switch phones
But also beyond just that the networks that route calls and texts globally are not very secure… and it’s not as hard as it should be to get access to it.
This shit drives me nuts. I’ve put in a lot of effort to secure my accounts but a number of them require SMS without any opt out. We have known about the risks of SMS plenty long enough at this point.
To make it worse, SMS is incredibly insecure. Nothing should send you codes via SMS
Theoretically sure, but the chances of anyone getting their SMS hacked and their 2FA code being used to compromise their account is so infinitesimally small that it’s not even worth mentioning.
It is coding for the lowest common denominator of user – those who use the same easily-guessable password for everything. Making them click a link to login is honestly better security.
Of course there should be an option for those of us who have a TOTP app and use a password manager.
Can’t brain today, I have the dumb. What’s TOTP, other than that BBC show?
Time based one time passwords. Those (usually) six digit codes which get replaced every 30 seconds or so. During setup you copied the secret to your device (usually smartphone) and now your device and the server you authenticate at can calculate the same secret code every thirty seconds.
Which reminds me: I just got a new phone and totally forgot about Authenticator apps
I was able to recover one but the other is lost and I still need to get those accounts reset
Adding a shameless plug here: Aegis is available on f-droid and allows you to backup your 2FA secrets on your own server (e.g. own nextcloud) in case you don’t trust the default Google authenticator.
I’m due to rebuild my lab this winter so I’ll make sure to take a look
I’m due to rebuild my lab this winter…
Famous last words before emerging 3 years later.
Personally I’m frustrated with always having to give a working phone number to accounts.
I have no idea if I’ve been at all successful in poisoning my data but all my accounts use unique generated emails in addition to generated passwords and fake profile info. It’s just habit now.
However all too often the one piece of real data I have to give is my phone number, and that would be really useful to cross-link all my accounts for data brokers building a dossier on me.
I have hundreds of fake emails but can create at most a couple phone numbers
I’m paranoid so I view passkeys and similar streamlined login mechanisms as a way to make it easy for police to access your entire digital life once they unlock your phone.
This is why manufacturers started pushing biometric unlocking so hard. Once someone has access to your person and phone they no longer need PINs or passwords to gain access to everything.
gg ez ease of use feature, which is hilarious because that’s exactly where smishing attacks come in. People are actually more willing to give out the OTP than their actual password, so it definitely less secure.
I think this started out as a decently good idea, like sign in with a device type of feature (think QR code from an authenticated device), but then along the way someone just went “screw it” and changed it to an OTP.
Even in 2025 password managers are rare, people still reuse the same 8 character password everywhere, and people fall for low effort scams. So someone thought “if they’re gonna be insecure anyway, lets just make it so they never have to use a password and sync it to their phone or email”.
My previous bank does this sends an SMS. Extremely insecure & also pointless if a would be thief has my phone (if im stupid enough to use no/easily guessable PIN) or has compromised it.
Is there not an argument that password managers have been around long enough now that anyone reusing logins & easily guessable passwords responsible for their own stupidity? We all know not to leave our doors & windows wide open when we go on vacation.
banks have the most obnoxious, yet the stupidest security measures.
Banks are the web sites most likely to reject a generated password from my password generator
It’s been a few years, I dont know if they ever fixed it…
However, at least as of 2022, Wells Fargo (the 4th largest bank), had case insensitive passwords.
If you made your password
hUnTer2, you could also log in withHUNTER2,hunter2,HUntEr2, etc.All I can say is: Take my money!
How stupid of WF.
you underestimate how bad a lot of people are at using technology. something like banking can be a necessity and must be accessible to all. many banks should encourage more secure MFA but i understand why they can’t require it.
sometimes people just need to learn
we don’t always need a race to the dumbest bottom
accessibility must not mean sacrificing security
I hate the SMS ones, because I don’t have a good phone signal in my home, so I have to ruin around trying to get a couple of bars so I can get the effing code. My banking app just uses a fingerprint.
Outsourcing the securiry risk to a third-party
Yup. “That’s not on me! Your email was compromised! That’s between your email provider and you!”
Because people don’t realize how ridiculously insecure SMS and (usually unencrypted) email are.
It’s just kids who never had a mentor.
Which services? I haven’t stumbled upon a single one
From my experience things like this are not important services. they are things where I keep the password in an online password service which I won’t do for anything important.
Can’t be liable for theft if there were no locks?
Because passwordless authentication is awesome and needs to be the standard. It’s basically just skipping the password and going straight to 2FA, which is the main security behind any account that you’ve got 2FA on.
If you skip the password then you’re back down to just 1FA, it just happens to be the factor that used to be second.
Yeh but with 2FA the password is essentially irrelevant because no one other than you can get in even if they have your password, so why not just skip it?
What downsides are there to passwordless authentication in your mind?
I’m not defending passwords specifically. You could do better 2FA with email + biometrics, although of course device authentication is only as secure as the device itself—but that’s entirely beside the point, which is that there must be two factors if you’re going to call something two factor authentication.
Passwordless isn’t 2FA……it’s passwordless. I’m not calling it 2FA.
Because the password still needs to be correct. What if the thief has your phone but no password
If a thief already has your phone unlocked then nothing else matters, you’re fucked and all your accounts are compromised.
Password reset?
But they don’t have access to your email in this instance.
If the thief has your email and password and phone then you’re SOL
If they’ve got your phone with your 2FA they’ve also got your email on your phone lol
If they don’t have email access, why is a passwordless magic link sent to an email bad then?
The tech “enthusiasts” of Lemmy are really showing their arses in here lol. They have a “I took 2 semesters of computer science so I’m somewhat of an expert” level of understanding and mentality.
There’s a reason most big tech companies are starting to move to passwordless logins. If 2FA is the ultimate protection about unauthorised access, the password is ultimately irrelevant - and given all we know about password reuse and data breaches, getting rid of them is a good thing.
It’s an immediate red flag for me.
Too many big password breaches also occurred to me.
But that’s what MFA is there for, although they shouldn’t be using SMS as one of the possible factors - let alone the main one, as seems to be the case.
Yeah but your password on my product with MFA is probably used everywhere else without MFA. Most products have a low risk security profile so they don’t want to be the leak for higher risk stuff.
