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Comment by htmltablesrules | Hacker News Reader

>No more password column in your database...

Who has liability when a user of mine says their account got hacked? The email provider? My site? Mozilla?

If one of my users has $100 go missing from their account, then they are going to expect me to replace it, not the email provider, not mozilla. I don't like the idea of shifting security to a outside platform, because I still retain all the liability when things go bad, and they always will (key loggers, spyware...)

Sites that deal with financial transactions will be reluctant to adopt this for sure.

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Sites that deal with financial transactions are almost always 5-10 years behind on the adoption curve; of course they will be reluctant to use Persona. And that's not unreasonable.

How can any website protect a user against key loggers, spyware or any other form of a compromised client machine? If the client machine is compromised, any login method is broken.

As mentioned above, two factor authentication.

Not really. All 2 factor authentication schemes that I've seen give no protection against a compromised client machine.

In theory you could probably device a scheme that would require the use of two independent devices to perform any sensitive action and that would guarantee that if only one of the devices is compromised, the attacker would have no way to perform any action in a name of the user. But I'm afraid any such scheme would be a complete failure from a usability perspective.

When the second factor is a "rich" device, such as a smart phone, attaching transaction information to the interaction would be a trivial - instead of texting "The code is 1234", text "Transfer $100 to account 9876" or "Login attempt from IP 1.2.3.4, FooCom Inc, Springfield, Oregon, USA.", followed by "If correct, enter code 1234. If not, DO NOT enter the code and contact us at .. "

For financial items you could use two factor authentication. Or if your service has something that can be done with a lower set of privileges you could use persona there and fall back to "more secure" methods for anything with financial effects or account changes.

The use case seems to be more for sites like twitter, hacker news, reddit, etc...

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