And then realize that you need to support them, because they are the most universal solution there is for an average user. Email/Username + Password is the most portable way to do login as a user that we have invented.
Every project has some amount of "being quirky/different" capital. If your project is not explicitly trying to innovate, or does not for some particular reason need to be very secure, then do not spend that capital on confusing users with the login flow. You'll turn a bunch of users away and cause a whole lot of support tickets, for very little benefit. Make users only think about stuff by making it unintuitive or different if it's really worth it to your product.
It's a lot simpler to implement (just one flow instead of signin / signup / forgot), less catastrophic when your data is breached, piggybacks on the significant amount of work that already goes into securing email, gives you 90% of the benefits of 2FA / FIDO / Web Authn / whatever for free with 0 implementation cost, makes account sharing harder (good for business), and is easy to extend/replace with oAuth for specific domains.
No I won’t log into my email multiple times per day because you are too lazy to hash passwords.
It always depends on the audience but if your users are somewhat technically literate you need passwords.
Wouldn't systems like this put a lot of trust on their users? Say you use a magic link on an compromised wifi network, like in a hotel, coffee shop, airport and so on without being on a VPN. Which some users will inevitable do.
I completely agree with the "most use cases" though. As long as you can't change the associated e-mail without additional requirements.
(I've also seen phone + phone OTP, but oh please never ask me for a phone number ever again. My phone number should always only be for making and receiving calls, not for verifying any sort of identity or personhood.)
Of course, nothing beats the security and privacy of username + password + TOTP (or security key), but you can't necessarily expect normal users to know to do that (or how).
Hell, I've seen at least one site that keeps the login username (what you actually use to sign into your account) separate from the public username (what everyone else sees), just to even more disconnect the login credentials from anything a potential attacker would have access to. But this is overkill for most scenarios (that particular platform does have a good reason).
Also, magic links need to be designed so that I can login on my PC, and click the link on my phone, and be logged in on the PC.
Though I've really enjoyed using QR codes to login, that has been a really smooth modern experience.
I feel that way too - I hate it when I'm trying to log in on desktop and the email shows up as a push notification on my phone.
The problem is what happens if someone enters someone else's email address and that person unwittingly clicks on the "approve" link in the email they receive. That only has to happen once for an account to be compromised.
So now you need "enter the 4 digit code we emailed you" or similar, which feels a whole lot less magical than clicking on a magic link.
Presumably there are well documented patterns for addressing this now? I've not spent enough time implementing magic links to have figured that out.
Eh? In a sane magic link system, clicking the magic link grants the clicker access to the account. Right then and there, in the browser that opened the link.
If I enter my email in SomeSite, they send a magic link to my email address, and then Mallory intercepts that email and gains access to my SomeSite account just by opening the link (i.e. the link acts as a bearer token), that's completely broken.
If email is your master key to everything I would worry.
No.
If magic links only log you in on the device you click them on, they prevent a lot of phishing attacks.
With a setup like that, there's literally no way to impersonate your website and steal user credentials.
This comes at a cost of making logins on public computers less secure, and which of these is more important should be weighed on a service-by-service basis.
A website for making presentations should obviously choose "more phishing and easier to use on public computers", a service for managing your employees' HR records should obviously choose the opposite.
Two scenarios I had recently, where I absolutely, utterly hated this pattern:
* I did not remember the mail address for such a thing because I started (too late) to use a different mail address for every service, thanks to Apples iCloud hidden addresses. And because there was no corresponding password, there was no entry in my password manager. I since rectified that, but it’s annoying.
* I tried to login on an older Windows PC - the magic mail landed on my iPhone. And because cross-system technical standards are a thing of the past the only possibility to get the magic link to the other system was to transcribe it.
I absolutely despise this. Every time I want to quickly log into an app and check something, just to sit in front of my synchronising mail client, wondering if the email will arrive, be caught by the spam filter, or just have random delay of a few minutes. Awful.
It’s a nightmare if they also insist on short lived sessions.
So for me, email + email OTP is the way to go.
security key is at least somewhat better than TOTP because it's not (or less-)phishable
> Of course, nothing beats the security and privacy of username + password + TOTP (or security key), but you can't necessarily expect normal users to know to do that (or how).
The ways this is currently implemented are often terrible, but not always. I'll give an example: I recently did a stint at "Green company" and they gave me a yubi key. They also used Microsoft for most things. To login with Microsoft authenticator I type in my username and password, click yes on the next page, and then click yes on my phone. But to use the yubi key was needlessly frustrating. First, Microsoft doesn't let you use it as the default method (hardware key). So then you have to click "use another form of authentication", "hardware key", "next" (why? Idk), and then finally you pin and tap the key. A bunch of needless steps there and I'm not convinced this wasn't intentional. There's other services I've used working at other places where it's clean and easy: username + password, then pin+ tap key (i.e. hardware key is default!).
I seriously think a lot of security issues come down to UX. There's an old joke about PGP
How do you decrypt a PGP encrypted email?
You reply to the sender "can't decrypt, can you send it back in clear?"