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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

I think a huge benefit of 2fa, one of the main purposes of it, was for securing accounts with weak passwords. Back in the days before password managers etc. I think these days password managers actually deprecate the need for 2fa

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Multiple layers are always better. If your computer or browser is compromised, then your password manager's secrets have been pwned, but with 2FA your accounts are still safe (assuming the 2FA is on a separate device, which it really should be)

There's also non-tech users to consider. It's pretty hard to convince users to use a password manager; plenty of people still re-use the same password across sites. It's impossible to prevent that. But it is possible to enforce 2FA for _your_ site.

Your first example is interesting, but it's much more limited than you describe. The attacker can't use your credentials to authenticate their own session, but they have complete control over the authenticated session on your laptop. I can't think of an account I have where that would be meaningfully less bad.

The attacker has access to all of your authenticated sessions on your compromised laptop. They don't have access to any un-authenticated accounts which have 2FA enabled.

Further because 2FA is simpler, a session can time out in a shorter amount of time.

Passwords are an antipattern. Password managers are just a crutch to make it less painful.

Password recovery is often done through the phone via SMS (health care/banking) when a 2FA hardware key would be safer. And since you're implementing 2FA, just remove the password, and ask the user to use the 2FA key.

I think my favorite example of using SMS in the least sane way possible is PayPal.

I have a hardware key AND an authenticator app active for the account, but they STILL won't let me send transactions without entering a code sent to my phone number. And actually, not even then, because even though I receive the code fine, they say they can't authenticate me and don't give me a chance to enter it. Yes, it's a VOIP number, but it's been the same VOIP number for the 10 years I've had the account. It's not like it's new.

I needed to recover my user account / password through Voya recently for a corporate 401k.

They needed to send me 3(!) SMS messages in the process. One to get the username (with a valid email address). One more to request to change the password. And one more to actually change the password.

Every now and then you hear about a leak at some company that was storing passwords in clear text. Thanks to password managers this only affects that one site, but it still makes me thankful for 2FA.

I don't understand the threat model there. Wouldn't nearly all hacks that lead to plain text passwords also allow the hacker to access all the login-protected data, making a more secure login process pointless?

Not necessarily. It's common practice for a hacker to break into a site, grab the passwords, then sell them or release them on the dark web.

The methods they used to break into the site are often considered "trade secrets".

Wrong - mfa is to prevent credentials stuffing mostly

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