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But what about the non-techie who is compromised during a "tech support" scam session or by a phishing email ("This is IRS calling...")? They don't know it's be

• gnarbarian 9y ago
  the situation is still better because when those people find out they can actually get a new public cert unlike now.
• dredmorbius 9y ago
  I'd have to see more of how you think such an attack might work, and think of how to defend against it. In general though: 1. The use of a physical authentication mechanism makes exfiltration far more difficult. The problem with passwords is that they can be sniffed with absolutely no awareness by the victim. A device or token you have to have yourself is going to make its absence known. (This presumes it's not cloneable.) 2. That reduces the attack surface for phishing. What I suspect is is that you'd see other forms of attack -- say, trying to get recurring charges inserted into bills or some such, rather than full account access. 3. In the event of token compromise, the ability to determine after the fact that a device was compromised and invalidate the subsequent transactions would be helpful. (Sorting out who bears the risk for that would be an interesting question. I'd like to put the burden on the banks, as they're best positioned to detect such activity.)