Yes, quite unpopular since keyloggers and clipboard watching malware are probably a threat model to many more people than someone stealing a security key off your keychain.

On the other hand, stealing session tokens is typically going to require reaching inside the browser process, which is perhaps the most sophisticated software on a machine, and then groping around to find these tokens. It definitely is possible in some cases but it's likely to be pretty hard.

I'd compare it to the difference between stealing a person's credit card from a bag they left under their seat versus reaching under somebody's shirt to take the money they've tucked into their bra. I don't doubt that somebody, somewhere, is good enough to get away with that second one unnoticed, but I know for sure the first one is easier.

Stealing session tokens can be as easy as just pulling the entire browser profile, which I doubt requires elevated access.

I imagine black market postexploitation kits would have session data theft as a feature.

Again, if somebody has system access, you're probably completely fucked from a different angle irrespective of your preferred authentication method so now we're talking about semantics of how you're getting fucked because most 'apt's are going to be grepping your disk for words key phrases like 'financial data', not caring about your facebook account.

In most corporate environments that's far more damaging than getting persistence in a handful of webapps.

Also, 2FA solves this exact issue.

A authentication event requiring a hardware token is significantly harder to deny, especially if used again by the legitimate user after the questionable event. So any insider attacks that are not last-hurrahs or one-shots plausibly explained by theft are significantly riskier.

If you're trying to have rock solid audit trails that will stand up in court: This, or 2FA won't have a huge functional difference, but chances are unless you have NSA/Google tier security, your money would be better spent hardening infrastructure - your logs won't be worth jack if a pentest rips your network apart in two hours. I regularly see $1m+ SEIM deployments on MS17-010 vulnerable networks, I feel like security gimmicks like these distract them away from fixing real problems and are, if anything, detrimental to security.

(Your terminology is weird. What do you mean by MFA where USB tokens aren't in-scope? I guess you mean an authenticator app on a mobile device).

Where I work, we use Yubikeys, which are used as 2FA for almost everything: * SSO on all web internal web sites, the SSO implementation supports U2F * short-lived (less than a day) ssh certs signed by Yubikey OTP * VPN access authenticated by Yubikey OTP

Enrolling of yubikeys is self-service, and supports up to 2, and employees in critical positions can have 2. Re-setting the Yubikey OTP pin is mostly self-service, but you need to enter it any time you VPN or get a new ssh cert, so you are more likely to forget your phone at home than your Yubikey OTP pin.

> I feel like security gimmicks like these distract them away from fixing real problems and are, if anything, detrimental to security.

Many banks (especially in my country) rely on SMS OTPs. Some banks have OTP authentication for their websites on their mobile apps (but then if you uninstall the app, you have to re-enroll, which is quite tedious).

I would much prefer all banking sites to support U2F/WebAuthn, and hopefully that would also sufficiently motivate good support on phones for U2F/WebAuthn. If they allowed you to turn off any SMS-based OTPs (e.g. if they support recovery codes and 2 tokens), I think it would be possible to eliminate SIM-swap fraud (which is quite rife here ...).

And to be clear, I don't mean this in place of good password managers, I mean in addition to password managers. Defense-in-depth and all.

The concern is, a customer is tricked into _legitimately_ authorising transaction A ("Send my cousin $50 for emergency cab fare") but the bad guys use the authorisation instead for transaction B ("Send my entire account balance to Anne Actual Crook in Russia") and the bank thinks everything checks out because they used multi-factor. Making the transaction details part of the authentication can defuse this significantly if you do it properly.

A straight forward WebAuthn setup which is just proof of control isn't enough there. Maybe you can put together something using extensions to WebAuthn or fudge it somehow to add these transaction details, but out of the box the banks seem to be going for:

* Bank branded authenticator apps for smartphones

* SMS (ugh)

* Custom authenticator devices with their own input

It would be abundantly obvious to me if I were going to put my paypal password into anything but paypal, for instance, because I wouldn't even have the option. I'd have to copy/paste if I wanted to, which would up my suspicion level to the extreme.

(this is not to downplay security keys though, I think they're very important)

That's what people say but even security experts have fallen for phishing attacks. And since the autofill is not 100% reliable, it's not that unusual to go into the password store and manually get the password out of there.

I have had it fail to autofill due to site implementation, and the couple of times it happened I was extremely on my guard and triple-checked everything before proceeding.

I think that's the important part of this, the manager has to be reliable enough that the bypass mechanism stands out _a lot_, and the user has to be aware.

Example: "https://hbweb.incompass-solutions.com/" uses the same credentials as "http://www.equineline.com/" since they're both owned by the Jockey Club.

I imagine you can extract passwords out of security keys in some form without being on the correct domain, too.

Do domain check fails that regularly? I'm sure enterprise configuration policies would provide functionality to prevent password extraction should you be inclined to enable it.

There's no UI. Even if you are 100% convinced this is really your bank, you desperately want to sign in, you keep tapping that button, trying again, it can't help the bad guys. There is no "Yes I'm really sure this is my bank" option that destroys your security.

Password managers have to be compatible with the reality of how passwords are used/ abused by site owners. When my preferred electricity supplier was bought by Shell (as part of an exercise in greenwashing the huge fossil fuel company) they rebranded and all their URLs changed overnight. My passwords still worked - but on these new URLs. This looks _exactly_ like a phishing attack, except for the huge advertising spend on a cynical rebranding exercise.

If you sell a password manager that fails in this scenario you're getting customer feedback saying this product doesn't work, fix it. How can you fix it? Add an override, destroy the security value of the product.

But WebAuthn comes out of the box enforcing this rule that the FQDN can't change. When Shell buys the electricity company and says "All your sites need to change" if they used WebAuthn the developer says "I tried that and it breaks login for all customers". "Tell them to override it, put up a banner saying so". "There is no override"... "OK, put the old site back". Done. Users saved from security lapses caused by corporate rebranding.

The WebAuthn people put a bunch of effort into thinking about evil things that can go wrong and defending against them. Having a clean slate to start from helped enormously.

If currently there's no password manager in existence that doesn't let you override the plaintext password extraction / override feature, there's nothing to stop one being made. You could probably hook it in with a system level service which cryptographically signs them, too.

Hard to believe. Can you substantiate that claim? Also you don't need to detect it, you only need to not fall for it.