4 ms·

They don’t seem that outdated to me, given the evidence presented. email provider security is a real problem but is usually considered the root of trust for per

They don’t seem that outdated to me, given the evidence presented. email provider security is a real problem but is usually considered the root of trust for persons…

nnx 4y ago
Also a possible way for magic links to be secure even if email is compromised is for the requesting browser to create a secret client side so that only that browser can actually proceed with the magic link.
- joosters 4y ago
  If the email is compromised, the hacker can just go to the front page in their own browser and generate a fresh login email, so there's no extra protection in client-side browser secrets.
  - xxs 4y ago
    It'd be ok, if there is (yet) another factor for doing this, e.g. SMS, time based tokens, and you'd need 2 of them to reset the 3rd. Cumbersome to put it mildly.
DocTomoe 4y ago
One of the first things I learned when I got onto the internet was that "consider (RFC822) emails to be postcards analogs, readable by anyone who stumbles over them, they are not like mail which hides its content in an envelope." That was in 1994. Shirts reading "I read your email" were popular with the IT guys up to until about ten years ago (and they are still being offered). Email is an inherently insecure, non-trustworthy system. Considering it the "root of trust" sounds scary.
- yababa_y 4y ago
  and yet, it is! for many webapps, and not long ago almosy all. pop someone’s email and suddenly you have access to gazillions of account recovery flows. despite email’s flaws, it’s the defacto decentralized user namespace and authorization fallback. in the case of modern email, t only the sender, receiver, and a chain of usually-authenticated intermediates actually can see the contents of mail. it’s not completely plaintext anymore, i don’t think it’s as scary as you would think in 1994. and if modern email transports don’t count, then isn’t it true that _any_ messaging system could be considered as postcards in that whoever stumbles across the message contents can read it?
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    > if modern email transports don’t count, then isn’t it true that _any_ messaging system could be considered as postcards in that whoever stumbles across the message contents can read it? You are mistaking transport layer "security" with information security. It's a common, yet potentially grave mistake. Secure communication depends on encryption that is "good enough" so that unauthorised decryption takes too much resources or too much time to be practical, with the only encryption secrets being held by the sender and the receiver. We usually call that approach "End-to-end encryption", or E2EE. It is also something political entities try hard to ban, for obvious reasons, if you consider them mostly being suppressive-authoritarian surveillance state actors. (yes, I am aware of the '5 dollar hackwrench' xkcd comic [1]. If your state actor uses that tactic against you, you have a whole different problem). True E2EE solutions for email exist, but - mostly because virtually no one wanted the extra hassle - they never got adopted widely. In a perfect world, metadata would also be encrypted - or nonexistent at all (there are implementations for that, for example PGP-encrypted messages over bitstream over TOR (I know your 'bitstream address', but all messages get broadcast, e.g. via blockchain, to everyone, and you only pick out those that match your bitstream address. Because you have only your own private PGP key, you can't read the messages to other bitstream addresses, even though you have them). [1] https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- bradgessler 4y ago
  That’s why I keep the harder-to-guess secret in the browser where the code request was initiated. If somebody read the code from your “postcard” and tried to enter it, they’d see an error and have to start over. Problem I have with most password reset schemes is they put the secret token in a URL, which is visible to all by the postcard analogy.

They don’t seem that outdated to me, given the evidence presented. email provider security is a real problem but is usually considered the root of trust for persons…

nnx 4y ago

Also a possible way for magic links to be secure even if email is compromised is for the requesting browser to create a secret client side so that only that browser can actually proceed with the magic link.

joosters 4y ago
If the email is compromised, the hacker can just go to the front page in their own browser and generate a fresh login email, so there's no extra protection in client-side browser secrets.
- xxs 4y ago
  It'd be ok, if there is (yet) another factor for doing this, e.g. SMS, time based tokens, and you'd need 2 of them to reset the 3rd. Cumbersome to put it mildly.

DocTomoe 4y ago

One of the first things I learned when I got onto the internet was that "consider (RFC822) emails to be postcards analogs, readable by anyone who stumbles over them, they are not like mail which hides its content in an envelope." That was in 1994. Shirts reading "I read your email" were popular with the IT guys up to until about ten years ago (and they are still being offered). Email is an inherently insecure, non-trustworthy system. Considering it the "root of trust" sounds scary.

yababa_y 4y ago
and yet, it is! for many webapps, and not long ago almosy all. pop someone’s email and suddenly you have access to gazillions of account recovery flows. despite email’s flaws, it’s the defacto decentralized user namespace and authorization fallback. in the case of modern email, t only the sender, receiver, and a chain of usually-authenticated intermediates actually can see the contents of mail. it’s not completely plaintext anymore, i don’t think it’s as scary as you would think in 1994. and if modern email transports don’t count, then isn’t it true that _any_ messaging system could be considered as postcards in that whoever stumbles across the message contents can read it?
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  > if modern email transports don’t count, then isn’t it true that _any_ messaging system could be considered as postcards in that whoever stumbles across the message contents can read it? You are mistaking transport layer "security" with information security. It's a common, yet potentially grave mistake. Secure communication depends on encryption that is "good enough" so that unauthorised decryption takes too much resources or too much time to be practical, with the only encryption secrets being held by the sender and the receiver. We usually call that approach "End-to-end encryption", or E2EE. It is also something political entities try hard to ban, for obvious reasons, if you consider them mostly being suppressive-authoritarian surveillance state actors. (yes, I am aware of the '5 dollar hackwrench' xkcd comic [1]. If your state actor uses that tactic against you, you have a whole different problem). True E2EE solutions for email exist, but - mostly because virtually no one wanted the extra hassle - they never got adopted widely. In a perfect world, metadata would also be encrypted - or nonexistent at all (there are implementations for that, for example PGP-encrypted messages over bitstream over TOR (I know your 'bitstream address', but all messages get broadcast, e.g. via blockchain, to everyone, and you only pick out those that match your bitstream address. Because you have only your own private PGP key, you can't read the messages to other bitstream addresses, even though you have them). [1] https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
bradgessler 4y ago
That’s why I keep the harder-to-guess secret in the browser where the code request was initiated. If somebody read the code from your “postcard” and tried to enter it, they’d see an error and have to start over. Problem I have with most password reset schemes is they put the secret token in a URL, which is visible to all by the postcard analogy.