What SMS is terrible for is as a single point of account recovery. This is unfortunately how it is often used. "Multi factor authentication" in practice has become "Use any one of multiple available factors for authentication", which is awful.
What SMS is terrible for is as a single point of account recovery. This is unfortunately how it is often used. "Multi factor authentication" in practice has become "Use any one of multiple available factors for authentication", which is awful.
So no, SMS is not perfectly good. it's crap and needs to die in a fire.
I know that frequencies are different in some parts.
A proper OTP app works offline, and more than one of them can exist for any given authentication, so you can have backups if your phone is stolen.
It's better than just having "secret" as your password, but not by nearly enough that you should feel particularly secure with it.
The issue with with all multi factor authentication is dealing with the likely situation that one of your users locks themselves out of their account and needs to have the factors reset so they can get back in. The secure way to deal with that would be to go, "Sorry, we don't know you and you've lost all your data. Goodbye!". But of course with important accounts that usually escalates pretty quickly with upset users hogging your helpdesk employees and not giving up that easily. So, most companies have help desks that are easily talked into "helping you". That's what they are incentivized to do. Companies with tight margins are the worst. Like most operators for example.