Literally no one in security thinks this.

Better: not in a single metric but rather as a complete measure of both preventing unauthorized access to a resource and also _enabling_ authorised access to that same resource.

They also have 2fa built in. No need for a separate app, entering codes whatever.

Even if you don't like to rely on big tech (google/apple), I don't either, there are many options now for full FOSS implementations like bitwarden and KeepassXC.

If you use a yubikey as a passkey then yes, that's not a great option also because most services don't allow you to enroll more than one passkey. But with bitwarden that doesn't matter.

How do you sync passkeys to someone else's phone to authorize them to act in your name?

This is the basic use case, very common in the physical world, that security industry refuses to accept exists.

Passwords have this capability by nature.

> because most services don't allow you to enroll more than one passkey

Which is dumb and part of what makes passkeys not just useless, but dangerously so. Same story with 2FA, and the many services that only allow you to have one registered authenticator app at the time.

  > Well that's why they can sync between devices.

Not sure if either works on iOS, I don't use that but they work on desktop and Android (you use KeepassDX there to read them).

Passkeys are not an improvement. The way they're being implemented entrenches middlemen into auth flows in a way that reduces users' security in a broader sense, while being just as susceptible to compromise as any other form of credential.

Also, the original sin: framing it as "security" vs. "convenience". It's not. The other end of the spectrum is utility - as in, maximally secure computing device is an inert rock. More security means less utility - reduced functionality, constrained capability, reasonable use cases no longer possible. It means manual process where previously automation or batching was possible. It means more electricity, more compute, more money spent.

It means more user time and therefore more human lives wasted.

This ultimate non-renewable resource is what we're trading off when we accept even more security. This trade-off needs to be respected much more than it is.

That’s not what’s happening. Here you have security used as an excuse for vendor lock ins. Just like AI is used as an excuse for layoffs. But you shouldn’t confuse actual security with BS like this.

And it means more middlemen mediating people's access to their own tools.

I remember working at a major company where important systems had an admin password of "<company name>123". That was stupid. I asked to change it but the answer was no because too many people would have to be told the new password.

That was too much in favour of convenience and I'm surprised they never got pwned in the worst way.

These days the balance has swung way too much in favour of security though. Even when it concerns assets that have no value.

So what happened? Someone from IT came and said: "Oh yeah that always happens, just give me a USB stick and I'll stick it in the server". Which he did, no virus checking etc. This is the problem with processes that are too strict. They leave out usecases (often under a misguided "80/20 pareto" rule) and then people will figure out their workaround in unpredictable ways which you have no control over.

And most of the big hacks now are because of the move to cloud SaaS, especially salesforce instances are constantly being hit. Simply applying RBAC rules would fix that and not even interfere with anyone's job because the idea of RBAC is making sure that everyone can do just what they need to do their job and nothing more. But nothing LESS either. And of course some monitoring. If a local callcenter agent suddenly starts accessing 10.000 accounts per day instead of 20 a day, then yeah really you should be on the ball.

What youre complaining about isn’t security. It’s security theatre. Which is bullshit

> What you get is people getting sick of all the stupid hurdles and working around it. Using shadow IT. I find myself doing that too.

Unfortunately it’s people like yourself who implement shadow IT that end up forcing security and infra teams to add those annoying bureaucratic hurdles to force people in line.

But you do raise a point that I’ve often argued: good security needs to make it easy for people to do the right thing.

Unfortunately that takes a lot of time, effort, and investment to get right.

> And most of the big hacks now are because of the move to cloud SaaS, especially salesforce instances are constantly being hit.

lol no. That’s not even the tip of the iceberg.

> Simply applying RBAC rules would fix that and not even interfere with anyone's job because the idea of RBAC is making sure that everyone can do just what they need to do their job and nothing more.

Salesforce already has RBAC.

Also RBAC doesn’t prevent you from being hacked. It just limits the blast radius of what is exposed when you do get hacked. It also makes it harder for those who “know enough to be dangerous” to do the wrong thing. Like the shadow IT shenanigans you’ve admitted to.

It's because I still need to do my job. And I am also in the security team in fact. But we can't even "burn ISO's" anymore on memory sticks to install stuff in our test lab. When I ask they just say "80/20 rule" which apparently means, they spend the 20% effort on 80% of the usecases and the other 20% can go F themselves. Because the project manager doesn't care, he just wants to tick some boxes in the easiest way possible. That's how you get shadow IT.

> Also RBAC doesn’t prevent you from being hacked. It just limits the blast radius of what is exposed when you do get hacked. It also makes it harder for those who “know enough to be dangerous” to do the wrong thing. Like the shadow IT shenanigans you’ve admitted to.

Exactly, all the mega hacks with the release of millions of customers' data wouldn't have happened if that was properly implemented. Salesforce does have it but companies don't implement it.

And if people go to shadow IT it means that RBAC is not properly implemented because they don't have enough rights to do their job.

For starters, your complaint about IT is representative of bad IT operations. NOT security as an industry, like you claim it is.

And your comments about RBAC are such a massive oversimplification that I wonder if you actually do work in security at all. Because no competent security professional would claim that RBAC is a silver bullet that solves all issues.

Is it an open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement?

When the answer is yes, there is a high probability that it's something reasonable, e.g. TOTP.

When the answer is no, what you will find behind the curtain is either a fool or a crook.

Who is doing the securing, whose interests are being secured, and against who/what?

Security isn't an unqualified good thing to have. It's just an instrument of control. Who wields it and how are the paramount questions. You can have an "open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement", aimed at protecting interest of third parties, by securing the device from its actual owner. In fact, that describes many, if not most, security measures introduced in computing over the past 20 years, especially on the web and mobile devices.

The premise of the scary banner has to be that the first time the user has ever seen it is when there is actually something wrong.

This is, of course, fully incompatible with the corporate incentive to present the scary banner whenever an honest third party hasn't paid them the danegeld or satisfied a bureaucratic process documented by Franz Kafka. If the thing you care about is actually security.

Except that you can't, because those systems require the device to come with secret keys, so an interoperable third party implementation would require keys, which requires permission, which is the exact thing "permissionless" is intended to evict.

But it helps against account sharing, err I mean they make database leaks irrelevant except for private info of the customer, err I mean that we can now send more mail to the customer about new AI features without risking they think it is phishing, err I mean this is the easiest measure for the auditor findings so since we implemented this we don't need to fix all the crappy internal api auth problems and atrocious out of date dependencies, err I mean...

This is actually a feature, very common in real world, that security maximalists keep insisting is a bug.

Now try that with a bank/vendor app. Or any other communication app. Nowadays, many don't even put the message body into the notification anymore, so you can't forward it via another channel (e.g. via SMS).

b) These systems are a general pain when you need to deal with human support if your number on file doesn't match the number you call them from. I have a few different numbers that I use variously and run into this every so often - I get a barrage of extra verification questions if I call from a non-matching number, callbacks seem to happen randomly between my number on file vs. my number listed in a ticket, etc. My wife teases me about constantly breaking systems due to hitting untested edge cases.

(Tangentially, various systems will require you to input a phone number with no information stating that it must be a number capable of receiving texts, and at some future date will try to send your landline authentication codes via SMS.)

See Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

Reminds me of what Ubiquiti tried to pull a few weeks ago. They wanted to force everyone to their Cloud UI and login instead of the local interfaces so they reduced the local session lifetime to something insane like 20 minutes while lying to our faces and saying it is for security, and kept the session lifetime longer on their cloud panels. They made sure to exclude this from their changelog too.

The community started monkey patching their local scripts, wrote services to undo their changes, many people disabled auto-updates as Ubiquiti only makes their product worse with their updates. Publicly complained on their support forum that we are onto their little plot.

They ended up backtracking for now but you just know they will try again like Google does.

I had another vendor try to use this argument with us just last week, and I had to vigorously remind them that they were not hired as a security contractor, and that our usage of their product was required to conform to our security policies, not theirs.

Accountability is nonexistent in our industry.

The industry, and society at large, are today overrun with fiduciaries who've convinced themselves that they are the principals.

Without regulations, billion dollar, multi continent countries can do as they want because their owners, citizens, etc arn't considered targets even when they make these decisions in concert if not in colusion, if not in conspiracy.

Seriously, many web admins need to hear this message: "Chill. Your site is not that important."

Websites don’t know your account is a throwaway one, and making an exception for those accounts doesn’t make sense anyway.

Saying “ I accept full responsibility for the fallout” obviously doesn’t work on a large scale and here exceptions don’t make sense either.

Just use a password manager that generates and fills your passwords, and never worry about your passwords for those sites. Don’t tell web admins to drop basic security measures because you don’t know how to manage passwords.

> Seriously, many web admins need to hear this message: "Chill. Your site is not that important."

Beyond those, nothing is that important. Your random e-commerce site or discussion board are not that important. Neither is your ISP or the service where you fix your appliances (or phones). And especially not the random fly-by-night startups that want you to register before you test their "game changing" SaaS.

The sad irony is, the smaller and less important the site, the more stringent security measures they tend to deploy, because security theater is trendy nowadays. 2FA is so 2025, if you're not demanding passkeys, you're a dinosaur.

(A good heuristic to use: if your site has harder security than your government's core services, especially when it comes to recovering access, it's worth asking whether there's any actually sensible reason for it.)

But you can't - when it includes damage to the provider e.g. brand tarnishing.

A lot of user-access "security" is for the benefit of the provider, not the user.

Can't have that! We wouldn't have any data to sell!

We need ID, email verification address, phone number, and a selfie of yourself holding a handwritten sign saying, "I love <useless company #7983>" now.

And you have to do a captcha at every step. Click on every crosswalk, sucker.

The same with logging my hours in a different system. I only use those systems for those things, nothing else.

Security is important for things that actually hold value. Like when I connect to my admin account. Or even when I connect to our intranet. But they enforce the highest level even for stupid stuff.

Fixed desks are way more secure than promiscuous desk multiplexing.