4 ms·

Medium did this and it is horrible. Your suggestion solves nothing as you already considered, email bring a single point of failure. So why would anyone sign in

by a_imho 10y ago

Medium did this and it is horrible. Your suggestion solves nothing as you already considered, email bring a single point of failure. So why would anyone sign into a completely different service (for most people that being signed into Google which has its own baggage) just to use an app? 1. Sending emails is not very secure 2. Delegating your authentication to a 3rd party is probably not a very good idea 3. You still need to use a password somewhere e.g. accessing your emails, it can't be mitigated all the way down 4. Increasing the importance of social media accounts / email and allowing walled gardens to act as gatekeepers to services is annoying at best and very harmful at worst if you are concerned about your data

crummy 10y ago
Isn't Oauth delegating your authentication to a third party, and which is generally regarded as a good idea?
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  It's all about trust. If you trust the 3rd party more then it's good. That could be because the authentication provider has more resources to devote to things like intrusion detection. A separate service also isolates your credentials from the various services. Downsides include telling that 3rd party every time you sign in and putting all your access rights in one place.
- thisone 10y ago
  Oauth is an authorization protocol, not an authentication protocol
alkonaut 10y ago
> 1. Sending emails is not very secure Agreed. This is a stopgap measure until there is some agreed-upon standard for 2FA that doesn't involve email or text messages. > 2. Delegating your authentication to a 3rd party is probably not a very good idea Again, agree. This is of course assuming that everyone has an email provider of the gmail kind that they are both comfortable with trusting with everything and that it will always be available. That's a pretty bold assumption - but I think it's a pretty common one. > 3. You still need to use a password somewhere e.g. accessing your emails, it can't be mitigated all the way down It delegates the problem to a place you can trust, where you use a 2FA app or even a physical key, or at worst, a huge password of the kind you can remember ONE of, but not one per service. > 4. Increasing the importance of social media accounts / email and allowing walled gardens to act as gatekeepers to services is annoying at best and very harmful at worst if you are concerned about your data Yes, I realize the irony in trading the security of my data in 100 sites for storing it at google. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to do however, lacking some better solution (such as sites actually switching to using some standardized authentication method with physical tokens or similar).
StavrosK 10y ago
Your points are all invalidated by the mere fact that everyone already uses email for authentication. What do you think the "forgot my password" link does? The GP's flow just makes it more explicit.
- a_imho 10y ago
  How is it invalidated that you need the password mechanism to access your emails? Why would you put resources into annoying your users to sign into their email accounts too every time they want to use your service? It is a very bad design imo. Yes, password reset can be abused, but doing it all the time I would consider a security hole.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I guess the bullet points aren't the ones that are invalidated, it's the argument that sending a secret key over email to sign in is worse for security than having a password. It's not worse, it's strictly better, as right now everyone implements both ways and an attacker only needs to break the weakest one.
    - a_imho 10y ago
      Do not quite agree. Clearly having more attack surface is worse, but pushing large amounts of sensitive information through mail servers is increasing that surface as well.
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        How so? Any attacker can trivially push the information they're interested in right now anyway.
        a_imho 10y ago
        If many were to change to email based auth the chances of any leaked (accidentally sent, tricked into forwarding etc) email containing sensitive info would go up significantly. E.g. any mail from medium.com has a very high probability of containing login info. Second, increased roi makes mail servers more of a target.

by a_imho 10y ago

crummy 10y ago

Isn't Oauth delegating your authentication to a third party, and which is generally regarded as a good idea?

paulryanrogers 10y ago
It's all about trust. If you trust the 3rd party more then it's good. That could be because the authentication provider has more resources to devote to things like intrusion detection. A separate service also isolates your credentials from the various services. Downsides include telling that 3rd party every time you sign in and putting all your access rights in one place.
thisone 10y ago
Oauth is an authorization protocol, not an authentication protocol

alkonaut 10y ago

> 1. Sending emails is not very secure Agreed. This is a stopgap measure until there is some agreed-upon standard for 2FA that doesn't involve email or text messages. > 2. Delegating your authentication to a 3rd party is probably not a very good idea Again, agree. This is of course assuming that everyone has an email provider of the gmail kind that they are both comfortable with trusting with everything and that it will always be available. That's a pretty bold assumption - but I think it's a pretty common one. > 3. You still need to use a password somewhere e.g. accessing your emails, it can't be mitigated all the way down It delegates the problem to a place you can trust, where you use a 2FA app or even a physical key, or at worst, a huge password of the kind you can remember ONE of, but not one per service. > 4. Increasing the importance of social media accounts / email and allowing walled gardens to act as gatekeepers to services is annoying at best and very harmful at worst if you are concerned about your data Yes, I realize the irony in trading the security of my data in 100 sites for storing it at google. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to do however, lacking some better solution (such as sites actually switching to using some standardized authentication method with physical tokens or similar).

StavrosK 10y ago

Your points are all invalidated by the mere fact that everyone already uses email for authentication. What do you think the "forgot my password" link does? The GP's flow just makes it more explicit.

a_imho 10y ago
How is it invalidated that you need the password mechanism to access your emails? Why would you put resources into annoying your users to sign into their email accounts too every time they want to use your service? It is a very bad design imo. Yes, password reset can be abused, but doing it all the time I would consider a security hole.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I guess the bullet points aren't the ones that are invalidated, it's the argument that sending a secret key over email to sign in is worse for security than having a password. It's not worse, it's strictly better, as right now everyone implements both ways and an attacker only needs to break the weakest one.
  - a_imho 10y ago
    Do not quite agree. Clearly having more attack surface is worse, but pushing large amounts of sensitive information through mail servers is increasing that surface as well.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      How so? Any attacker can trivially push the information they're interested in right now anyway.
      - a_imho 10y ago
        If many were to change to email based auth the chances of any leaked (accidentally sent, tricked into forwarding etc) email containing sensitive info would go up significantly. E.g. any mail from medium.com has a very high probability of containing login info. Second, increased roi makes mail servers more of a target.