Re:The "email is authentication" pattern
by gloosx on Tuesday September 10, 2024 @01:39AM
(#41497475)
I also hate password expiration rules. A true manager's "bright idea" which is horrible for security. Once I was registered on a service which required a password change every month, so every single month I had to change a letter or number in my password, because they also stored all my previous passwords and did not let me just swap 2 passwords around, forcing me to create a "new" one every time. BTW my password is 24 characters of solid gibberrish which I can only remember by chanting a long mnemotechnique in my head, obviously never leaking anywhere and unpickable. So changing it is not easy. At some point I was so mad when I could not change a password in a way it did not repeat any of my previous modifications and still remembered easily, so i just put qwerty123 in, needing to log-in into service desperately. It was bruteforced days after.
Unfortunately, we lack the consistent language to measure risk and decide "do I really need 2FA on this site?" "Is 30 minutes a reasonable session time?". I think as long as someone has an up-to-date virus checker, most would rather stay logged in to stuff. Anyone ever been asked to delete all cookies to fix a problem on a site? My answer is always to "go fish".
I remember somebody saying before, "it's your account, if you want to stay logged in and risk a hack, it's your risk not the company running the service". I believe that more and more. If your laptop is logged in and someone deletes all your EC2 instances, that's on you, not AWS for not logging you out sooner. They could but why should they? Piss off 1M users to try and protect 1 person who is too careless?