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Comment by usrn | Hacker News Reader

IMO the primary reason they're pushing 2FA is for the people who are careless enough to eg log into their personal email on their work computer.

I wish there was an exam you could take that would get you a "computing license" that you could show to bypass a lot of this stuff.

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Enforcing 2FA is the most effective security rule ever created. Vastly more effective than password rules, rotation, user education, any anything else ever tried.

With 2FA, almost all of the traditional attacks are impossible and the only one left is specially crafted fake login pages.

Meh.

You're right when you're dealing with large groups of people which is exactly what I said in my original comment. If you understand these issues passwords on their own are fine. 2FA has some nasty edge cases that make it very easy to lose access to your account (which is what everyone in this thread is talking about.) So as always you're balancing security and availability. For some people the proper balance means just password authentication makes sense.

The best IMO would be client side certificates but no one except maybe Github supports those.

No, passwords on their own are never "enough" for you to be secure as you only control your side of the equation. You don't know if the place you are storing it is doing so in plain text, storing a decryption key right next to it, etc. Even if you are careful (I know what you said above), the network you are on could be compromised despite your best efforts/knowledge. Or any number of other things that could make it trivial for someone to gain access to your account in the event they gain access to simply the password.

I don't claim 2FA is perfect, it has its own host of issues as is being discussed. But it isn't just for "the masses that don't understand how to make strong passwords or how to be secure". Certs are good, but they need to be made simpler than they are now for the very people you claim 2FA is for or they won't be adopted (one of the reasons they aren't more ubiquitous, IMO). And some certs implementations have issues with account recovery as well if you lose access to them.

It's a really hard problem that you do a bit of disservice to when you dismiss it as "just a problem of the plebes".

> You don't know if the place you are storing it is doing so in plain text, storing a decryption key right next to it, etc.

Any service that is storing passwords in plain text is probably not implementing 2FA in an safe way, either.

That really isn't an argument against my point, that it's very hard to verify what is happening once you click submit with your password.

Password-only authentication still has its uses. I don’t want to use 2FA when I’m logging into a website I’ll use once and never again and does not have any private info about me, maybe to post a comment for example. Or try a service they are demoing.

Im glad news.yc and reddit don't require email to sign up...

Those are totally valid use cases. In no way was I saying everything had to offer 2FA. Just pointing out that it is not just for those that don't know how to craft strong passwords or those that practice poor security hygiene, that it is a useful option to have when security is important.

> careless enough to eg log into their personal email on their work computer.

Can you explain why that is an issue?

Employers keylog. How safe are those logs, for one?

A lot of work computers MiTM all traffic using a corporate certificate authority. A middle box tears apart the requests, and repacks it using its own cert.

> eg log into their personal email on their work computer

Can you elaborate on the specific risk here?

It can also reduce fraud reports -- if a transaction was authenticated with 2FA then it's less likely the fraud claim is legit and more likely it can be tossed.

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