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Comment by dsacco | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with regards to your risk analysis.

Your cost/benefit considerations prioritize relatively miniscule security improvements without considering usability costs or diminishing returns. While we're at it, why don't we just use one-time pads? After all, those are impervious to any form of cryptanalysis.

The risk profile for most users does not require a hardware-based auth factor if it results in real world usability sacrifices that end in either 1) accidental misuse or 2) gradual disuse.

You're optimizing for someone compromising the device, great. But the point is that if that risk if on the table, all of this work is essentially meaningless anyway.

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"if that risk if on the table, all of this work is essentially meaningless anyway"

I can't agree with this strongly enough. If someone's willing and able to hack your iPhone, then you need more help than a random art major writing a yubikey howto can give you.

Just an offshoot thought, but some random art major writing one of these guides giving a bird's eye overview of the entire process is something most businesses should be able to do themselves. But they don't.

I am only focusing on this bit because it is a few extra seconds of work if you are going to have a hardware token anyway. Why expose your TOTP secret if you don't have to?

I like knowing that if the phones and laptops of someone on my team were compromised, we have some damage control.

With the approach Yubico Authenticator takes an attacker with remote access to your Android Phone and a keylogger on your laptop still can't log in as you remotely.

Granted with more effort that combo can burn you in other ways, but TOTP on a hardware token still gives you some very real reduction in attack surface with no real added user burden. Why not?

Three people have answered that for you, and you keep ignoring them. We're protecting Google accounts, not TOTP secrets. We all understand that you can keep a TOTP secret more secure than a Google account. But since nobody cares about the security of a TOTP secret for a compromised Google account, I'm not sure why we're still talking about this.

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