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So I need a physical token for each of my bank accounts (3 bank accounts), each of my investment accounts (2 investment accounts), each of my e-mail providers (

So I need a physical token for each of my bank accounts (3 bank accounts), each of my investment accounts (2 investment accounts), each of my e-mail providers (2 e-mail providers) and one for every other service which might want to offer 2FA. Or, instead of that, I can have one smartphone, which has an app which handles all of those 2FA codes for me. Can you understand why I would prefer the smartphone option?

xte 8y ago
So you also can possibly enjoy having 2FA demolish by a simple smartphones vulnerabilities that perhaps grab both passwords and token in a single action... We can't trust smartphones/connected devices in general, that's why IMO is better, for safe auth only, use offline stuff.
- quanticle 8y ago
  So you also can possibly enjoy having 2FA demolish by a simple smartphones vulnerabilities that perhaps grab both passwords and token in a single action... Can you point to any instances where that's actually happened? Yes, sure, it's theoretically possible for someone to break into my fully patched phone and steal my 2FA secrets. But it's also theoretically possible for a mobster to break into my house, hold a gun to my head, and force me to log in to all of my banks accounts so that he or she can drain the money from them. There is no such thing as perfect security, and I would much rather have people using a 2FA app on their phone than just username/password. Is it perfect? No, of course not. But insisting that the existence of phone vulnerabilities makes 2FA apps on phone unacceptable, and that the only form of acceptable security is for people to juggle dozens of authenticator tokens is making the perfect the enemy of the good. It's because of "advice" like this that people ignore armchair security experts.
  - xte 8y ago
    Does you credit card ever lock you out? For most people no it's not happen, for Julian Assange we know it happen. Does we have an nuclear warhead explode by accident? A dangerous thing remain dangerous even before accidents happen.
em-bee 8y ago
loose your phone and all your accounts are locked until you can resolve it. that may be fine for some things, but surely not my bank account
- quanticle 8y ago
  I have far more confidence in my ability to hang on to a single smartphone than I have in my ability to hang on to a dozen or more separate 2FA hardware tokens.
  - xte 8y ago
    Your ability may be relevant but only to a certain extent: for instance I can restore my personal desktop with data and software from scratch quickly and easily from my multiple backups. I use NixOS so my OS will replicate autonomously, I have dotfiles managed via org-mode+stow (and trying homeManager), rsync and unison at hand. I'm pretty confident that I can survive many kind of crush quickly with enough safety. My phone however is an entirely different story: I can't backup it properly, I have to relay to obscure, proprietary and totally unreliable mechanism that prove to being able to restore only parts of my phone "operating environment" and in an unpredictable manner. What you can do with all your soft-token if your phone suddenly die? Another example in the past banks have had bankbook on paper, essentially ledgers that banks and their consumers have in hand, so both parties can prove a transaction. Now it's all on bank's servers, I can prove nothing as a consumers, I can only hope my bank do it's job well. Same if you buy shares, in the past you obtain a paper document that prove the transaction, now it's all on someone else server. You can take screenshots, perhaps have some sort of pdf receipts but they have essentially no legal value, anyone can forge them. Credit card are the same, internally they operate like paper bankbook, recording a certain number of transactions, however you have no control on that. That's the BIG point: it doesn't matter how skilled and provident you are, the systems it more and more designed in a way that you are TOTALLY powerless, no matter how many things you know and how attentive you are.
  - em-bee 8y ago
    my hardware tokens are locked safely at home or in the company office (to manage accounts for work), and only taken out when i need them. the phone i carry always around. the risk if loss or theft is always lingering. my wife just dropped her phone. it crashed. took 5 minutes to boot, i guess a filesystem check after the crash. it could have died completely too. my previous phone stopped working because of a botched update. we had a phone stolen... there are just to many uncertainties to trust a single portable device.

xte 8y ago

So you also can possibly enjoy having 2FA demolish by a simple smartphones vulnerabilities that perhaps grab both passwords and token in a single action... We can't trust smartphones/connected devices in general, that's why IMO is better, for safe auth only, use offline stuff.

quanticle 8y ago
So you also can possibly enjoy having 2FA demolish by a simple smartphones vulnerabilities that perhaps grab both passwords and token in a single action... Can you point to any instances where that's actually happened? Yes, sure, it's theoretically possible for someone to break into my fully patched phone and steal my 2FA secrets. But it's also theoretically possible for a mobster to break into my house, hold a gun to my head, and force me to log in to all of my banks accounts so that he or she can drain the money from them. There is no such thing as perfect security, and I would much rather have people using a 2FA app on their phone than just username/password. Is it perfect? No, of course not. But insisting that the existence of phone vulnerabilities makes 2FA apps on phone unacceptable, and that the only form of acceptable security is for people to juggle dozens of authenticator tokens is making the perfect the enemy of the good. It's because of "advice" like this that people ignore armchair security experts.
- xte 8y ago
  Does you credit card ever lock you out? For most people no it's not happen, for Julian Assange we know it happen. Does we have an nuclear warhead explode by accident? A dangerous thing remain dangerous even before accidents happen.

em-bee 8y ago

loose your phone and all your accounts are locked until you can resolve it. that may be fine for some things, but surely not my bank account

quanticle 8y ago
I have far more confidence in my ability to hang on to a single smartphone than I have in my ability to hang on to a dozen or more separate 2FA hardware tokens.
- xte 8y ago
  Your ability may be relevant but only to a certain extent: for instance I can restore my personal desktop with data and software from scratch quickly and easily from my multiple backups. I use NixOS so my OS will replicate autonomously, I have dotfiles managed via org-mode+stow (and trying homeManager), rsync and unison at hand. I'm pretty confident that I can survive many kind of crush quickly with enough safety. My phone however is an entirely different story: I can't backup it properly, I have to relay to obscure, proprietary and totally unreliable mechanism that prove to being able to restore only parts of my phone "operating environment" and in an unpredictable manner. What you can do with all your soft-token if your phone suddenly die? Another example in the past banks have had bankbook on paper, essentially ledgers that banks and their consumers have in hand, so both parties can prove a transaction. Now it's all on bank's servers, I can prove nothing as a consumers, I can only hope my bank do it's job well. Same if you buy shares, in the past you obtain a paper document that prove the transaction, now it's all on someone else server. You can take screenshots, perhaps have some sort of pdf receipts but they have essentially no legal value, anyone can forge them. Credit card are the same, internally they operate like paper bankbook, recording a certain number of transactions, however you have no control on that. That's the BIG point: it doesn't matter how skilled and provident you are, the systems it more and more designed in a way that you are TOTALLY powerless, no matter how many things you know and how attentive you are.
- em-bee 8y ago
  my hardware tokens are locked safely at home or in the company office (to manage accounts for work), and only taken out when i need them. the phone i carry always around. the risk if loss or theft is always lingering. my wife just dropped her phone. it crashed. took 5 minutes to boot, i guess a filesystem check after the crash. it could have died completely too. my previous phone stopped working because of a botched update. we had a phone stolen... there are just to many uncertainties to trust a single portable device.