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Comment by ryukoposting | Hacker News Reader

Customer service at one of my banks has an official policy of sending me a verification code via email that I then read to them over the phone, and that's not even close to the most "wrong" 2FA implementation I've ever seen. Somehow that institution knows what a YubiKey is, but several major banks don't.

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I'm security consultant in the financial industry. I've literally been involved in the decision making on this at a bank. Banks are very conservative, and behave like insecure teenagers. They won't do anything bold, they all just copy each other.

I pushed YubiKey as a solution and explained in detail why SMS was an awful choice, but they went with SMS anyway.

It mostly came down to cost. SMS was the cheapest option. YubiKey would involve buying and sending the keys to customers, and they having the pain/cost of supporting them. There was also the feeling that YubiKeys were too confusing for customers. The nail in the coffin was "SMS is the standard solution in the industry" plus "If it's good enough for VISA it's good enough for us".

But why won’t banks at least support customer provided yubikeys?

Because it's extra hassle?

> But why won’t banks at least support customer provided yubikeys?

> support

You answered your own question.

And that’s the answer isn’t it? Banks are behind the times in terms of security and tech.

Banks loathe anything relating, or adjacent, to good SWE principles.

Bank of America supports user purchased TOTP devices.

https://www.bankofamerica.com/security-center/online-mobile-...

Brokerage, not bank, but you can do Yubikey-only at Vanguard.

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=349826

The largest US crypto brokerages/exchanges support yubikey.

Some will provide and require them for top customers to ensure they are safe.

I'd guess part of the reason is that customers would blame the bank when their YubiKey doesn't work, which would become a nuisance for them as much as the YubiKey's usability issues are a nuisance for the customer.

I mean your employer wasn’t wrong. Yubikeys ARE way too confusing for the average user, way too easy to lose, etc. maybe have it as an option for power users, but they were right it would be a disastrous default.

Interesting. I assumed a lot of client software for small banks was vendored - I know that's the case for brokerages. Makes it all the weirder that they all imitate each other.

Here's the thing about SMS: your great aunt who doesn't know what a JPEG is, knows what a text is. Ok, she might not fully "get it" but she knows where to find a text message in her phone. My tech-literate fiancée struggles to get her YubiKey to work with her phone, and I've tried it with no more luck than she's had. YubiKeys should be supported but they're miles away from being usable enough to totally supplant other 2FA flows.

Financial institutions are very slow to adopt new tech. Especially tech that will inevitably cost $$$ in support hours when users start locking themselves out of their accounts. There is little to no advantage to being the first bank to implement YubiKey 2FA. To a risk-averse org, the non-zero chance of a botched rollout or displeased customers outweighs any potential benefit.

They're pretty terrible when they do.

For the longest time the max password size was 8 characters and the csr knew what your password was.

Heck I've had Chase security tell me they'd call me back.. dude that's exactly how people get compromised.

A friensd bank, hopefully not the one i use, only allow a password off 6 digits. Yes You read it right, 6 fucking digits to login, i hace him the asvice to run away from that shitty bank

Did this bank start out as a "telephone bank"? One of the largest German consumer banks still does this because they were the first "direct bank" without locations and typing in digits on the telephone pad was the most secure way of authenticating without telling the "bank teller" your password. So it was actually a good security measure but it is apparently too complicated to update their backend to modern standards.

They do require 2FA, though.

DiBa?

Exactly. 8 character password in the 2010s as the only factor was fine. It was only my money we're talking about.

Now I have to wait for an SMS. Great...

SMS is fine on most countries. It’s just America is dumb and allows number transfers to anyone.

Its also been a problem in Australia, Optus (2nd biggest teleco) used to allow number porting or activating sim against an existing account with a bare minimum of detail - Like a name, address and date of birth. If you had those details of a target you could clone their SIM and crack any SMS based MFA.

Is that alllowed now still?

Apparently changed in 2022 to protect consumers.

Number transfers in other countries is also mostly just a question of a bit of social engineering.

No. Most require some form of identification or matching identification between mobile providers.

I recently had an issue with a sim card and went to phone store that gave me a new one and disabled the old. They're supposed to ask for ID, but often doesn't bother. This is true for pretty much every country. Phone 2FA is simply completely insecure.

If the ID matching is done by humans, you can use social engineering on it.

See the sibling comment.

SMS is not E2E encrypted, so for all intents is just a plain text message that can/has been snooped. Might as well just send a plaintext emails as well.

Nope, I read The Register (UK based) and they've had scandals from celebrities having their confidential SMS messages leaked; SMS spoofing; I think they even have SIM cloning going on every now and then in UK and some European countries. (since The Register is a tech site, my recollection is some carriers took technical measures to prevent these issues while quite a few didn't.)

I don't think it's a thing that happens that often in UK etc.; but, it doesn't happen that frequently in the US either. It's just a thing that can potentially happen.

UK has plenty of other problems to solve first with identity thief.

...where identity is proved by utility bills instead of government issued id

How else do you prove you live some place?

“I pay the bills there” is barely better than nothing, though. We do this in Canada too. It is what I used for a driver’s license one renewal.

I don’t know about other parts, but here in France SMS is a shitshow. I regularly fail to receive them even though I know I have good reception.

This happened the other day while I was on a conference call with perfect audio and video using my phone’s mobile data.

A few weeks back, had some shop which sends out an SMS to inform you the job’s done tell me this is usually hit and miss when I complained about not hearing from them.

Many single radio phones can either receive sms/calls, or transmit data. My relative owns such a device and cannot use internet during calls or receive/make calls during streaming like YT video playback.

In my case this is an iPhone 14 pro. I'm pretty sure I can receive calls while using data, since I often look things up on the internet while talking to my parents.

And, by the way, the SMS in question never arrived. I don't know if there's some kind of timeout happening, and the network gives up after a while. Some 15 years ago I remember getting texts after an hour or two if I only had spotty reception. This may of course have changed in the meantime, plus this is a different provider.

SS7 is a global issue, and so is social engineering to get a number transferred or SIM card transferred.

https://hitcon.org/2015/CMT/download/day1-d-r0.pdf

Uh many banks provide MFA. And secure with hardware keys. It’s just that your level of assets doesn’t warrant that kind of protection.

Source: worked at all the major banks, all the wealthy clients use hardware MFA

They’re a bank. If they can secure their portals with hardware keys, at least allow customers to onboard their own keys.

My bank gave me an hardware token to protect my 5k€ account.

Get better banks people :)

I meant to say in the us. You know how backwards we are here :)

The bank I used in The Netherlands provides a MFA device as well. The device requires an ATM card as well to generate a random number.

This is the default for all their customers, wealthy or not.

https://www.abnamro.nl/en/commercialbanking/internetbanking/...

I meant to say in the us :)

> There is little to no advantage to being the first bank to implement YubiKey 2FA

Ideally they’d just implement passkeys (webauthn/fido). More secure, and it works with iOS, android, 1password, and yubikeys

Banks are in a tough spot. Remember, banks have you as a customer, they also have a 100 year old person who still wants to come to the branch in person as a customer. Not everyone can grapple with the idea of a Yubikey, or why their bank shouldn't be protecting their money like it did in the past.

The problem is that the bank will automatically enable online access and SMS-confirmed transfers for that 100 year old person who doesn't even know how to use Internet.

Just say BofA.

Not actually. Even if you enabled passkey, you still can login to their phone app via SMS. So it is not more secure. People who knows how to do SMS attacks certainly knows how to install a mobile app. And BofA gave their customers a fake assurance.

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