Also This strange trend to split username and password on to two separate pages, or only showing the password field after confirming the username
Not that strange. Different users may belong to different groups which may have different authentication backends. The associated authentication method is brought up once a username has been provided.
if your choice of api route directly affects your auth flow something is very wrong.
You can do that as part of an OAuth workflow. You don’t need to have them on separate pages for that to happen.
Yes, but, it also lets them slurp up email addresses. Routing users is legit tho.
Bonus stage 0: special login URL decided to crap out, and going back to any point in history automatically redirects to the error page that you can't use to log in, so you need to keep going back and trying to copy the URL before it redirects becausw Firefox interprets pressing "stop" as "do whatever you want idk"
Fucking aws...
You forgot step 2.5: incorrectly identifying stoplights 6 times in a row.
This is because of Enterprise Single Sign On. You can try this for yourself by going to https://gmail.com/ and enter the email of a public person at a large org, for example the CEO of Doordash (tony@doordash.com). After you enter the email, you get sent to Doordash's employee portal to authenticate. Based on the email you provide, Gmail has to figure out if you need to provide a password to gmail itself or if the email authenticates another way.
It's not like you can't add a "Log in with your company's SSO" button to the form. That works just fine and at least Microsoft does something like that.
Not sure I'd take design inspiration from Microsoft of all places. Also https://login.live.com/ has the same workflow email -> continue -> password. Not sure where you're seeing Log in with SSO option.
The best I've seen was yesterday where a website had the log-in button greyed out after the password manager filled my creds in.
So I had to manually click both the email and password field. Just click them. Then it enabled the log-in button.
So someone took their time to write a piece of JS that said "If the user hasn't focused both fields at least once, no login". Literally why? Extra code that does nothing useful.
I was hoping passkeys would be the solution to this madness, but it seems to me the entire spec gives too much power to the OS Makers and too little to the users because "mUh AtTtEsTatIoN" so now I don't know anymore
I've definitely run into that. Even more frustrating is when there was one particular site that forced me to actually delete the last character of my password and then retype it. Just focusing in the field wasn't enough, I had to actually send it a keystroke. And Ctrl-V to paste the password in manually didn't count. I suppose typing a random character at the end and then deleting it would have worked too.
When ctrl+v is disabled to "prevent brute force bots" or something ridiculous
My utitlies website doesn't let you login if the password field is autofilled by the browser. Whatever Angular-based form validation they are using doesn't play nice with Firefox's saved password feature. You have to manually type something in the password field, so I always add and remove a space from the password.
I sent an email to their support, hoping they would fix it, but they just responded saying that they can't reproduce it.
Well, I can reproduce it. I even told you how. That sounds like a skill issue.
Or worse:
Use email link -> use password instead
Enter password
Now enter the code that we sent you your email...
HEY BUT DO YOU WANT TO USE A PASSCODE?? PASSCODE! PASSCODE! USE THE PASSCODE! -_-
Yeah what the hell is up with that one? Seems so sketchy
Passkeys are okay, but your browser and OS want you to use them because you can’t just take a passkey to another platform, you have to create a new one, and it’s a pain in the ass.
It’s a lock-in gimmick latching on to a real useful solution.
Password managers can hold Passkeys now and they’re portable. Bitwarden stores all of mine, use them on any machine.
Yeh, I have passkeys in bitwarden.
I get it. Once they become ubiquitous, you click "login" your password manager prompts you to select account, and you are in.
No password that can be leaked, incorrectly stored, brute forced.
Corporations can pre-register company service passkeys for new users.
It's like mTLS, except staged.
While true, it still means you're locked into only being able to log in from a browser that has the password manager extension installed and logged in. Sometimes I want to log in from another machine, or another OS, or another browser, or even an incognito window that doesn't have access to my extensions.
That's false. My passkeys sync to my password manager and are available on all my devices
Passkeys are fine. It's just MTLS but by marketers (if by passcode you mean passkeys. otherwise, what's a passcode?)
alternatives to passwords are just excuses to harvest info
God I hate those stupid magic links. They're WAAAAYYY slower than just using my password manager.
AND they kinda contribute to locking you into Big Tech. I sometimes have problems with those stupid links because I don't have a Gmail account. Somewhere along the stupid chain there's probably some stupid check that delays or blackholes emails to non-big-tech domains.
Based.
Email is terrible. It's an unreliable communication system. You cannot depend on sent emails arriving in the recipient's mailbox—even the spam folder.
People incorrectly assume that all emails at least get to their spam folder. They don't. There are multiple levels of filters that prevent most emails from ever making it that far because most email traffic is bots blasting phishing links, scams, and spam. Nobody wants phishing and scam emails, but the blocks that prevent those are being used by big tech to justify discriminating against small mail servers.
I can't remember the site, now, but I literally couldn't log into one this week because the email never arrived.
I can’t remember the site, now, but I literally couldn’t log into one this week because the email never arrived.
Well, email allows you to solve that issue by self-hosting. But what you can't solve is that if you do self-host, gmail will drop your emails to spam or just discard them completely, just because it feels like it, even if you do the whole dance with DMARC and have used the domain for a good few years. It's frustrating as shit.
Ah but you see it's one factor of authentication that also conveniently loops in whichever email provider is spying on you
Ding! Ding!
This is the real answer: mail providers get to track you, your service get constant confirmation that your email is live (so they can send more ads from themselves plus their 400 closest affiliates). It's a win-win situation for everyone /s.
"The ~~beatings~~ enshitification will continue, until moral is improved."
Just let me use passkeys at this point. The way that people typically use passwords is less secure anyway, why not just make it as simple as possible?
I forget. Are passkeys the access method that prevents you from logging in ever again if you lose access to a device?
Typically, no. You're thinking of TOTP/Authenticator based 2FA. Those still come with backup codes in case you break the phone that has the TOTP codes warehoused. I always recommend keeping those backup codes saved in the notes of whatever password manager you're hopefully using.
Passkeys are essentially just one half of a cryptographic key pair (like what you'd use for authenticating SSH without passwords). These allow you to authenticate once using password + 2FA, then use the generated passkey for future sessions. Since these are much more complex than passwords and remove the need to actually remember anything, they are significantly more secure.
There are also some other features that I'm forgetting, and that may not be a perfectly accurate description, but I think you can get the gist.
Passkeys are supposed to be bound to one device and protected by that device's OS's secure enclave. If you have a second device you're supposed to create a second passkey.
That's why many sites will flat out refuse to let you create a passkey with a desktop browser since a PC-stored passkey doesn't fit the security model.
Only if you use the OS built-in saving.
Most password managers support them at this point, making them portable and secure.
I would love to use my physical Yubikey, but all the websites I've seen that allow passkey login always deny both Yubikeys.
And then...
The password manager can't fill the form. You've got to change your 10-word, unique passphrase because it's 3 months old. And you have to verify with a text.
Oh and then you have to type it in on your TV with a remote and on-screen keyboard.
Passkeys ❤️
If they arent on a USB stick, protected against being copied, they are only a single factor that instill false safety.
Or the obscure ways for 2FA/MFA. Passkeys are mostly cloud based. Yeah fuck no! The weakest Passkey is weaker than my usual random generated password, if the site don't do any shady business and require a weak password. Hardware keys are luckily not pushed for usage. I don't like them either. You require at least 2, for backup reasons. They also cost quite some money and they have zero auth. Just connect to usb and tap it. Also retrieving the backup and get a replacement for a defective one, takes some time.
Good old TOTP as 2FA is perfect, paired with a strong, random password. With my TOTP, I have an encrypted backup in my cloud, on my NAS, older backups in secure places and backup codes in several places. The TOTP App I use is open source and I have a mirror of the source code.
This should be enough security, if sites don't screw up all the time. You can bypass 2FA all the time. Even the credit card company screwed up big time. Usually you get 2 separate letters, one with your pin and one with your card. Both came on the same day. Also I actually didn't needed the pin in the first place. I was able to add the card to the app and see the pin there, without actually verifying anything, except the credit card number.
Maybe when passkeys are supported in my password manager, I will try it but so far it isn't and switching is not an option, as it doesn't support the features I need. There is an open issue for an alternative password manager, with that feature request and it has some people wanting it, but its still not added. But passkeys doesn't fix the issue for me using stronger keys, it fixes the site owners to allow stronger keys but they are still not required to use it. Some devs are just weird. I've read one PR for an FOSS project I use, where someone wanted to implement a universal oath or such stuff, that would support all types of external authentifications. Nope, the dev refused the PR and they wanted to stay at the 2 proprietary implementations, for 2 services, even though this universal implementation would work with these 2 too. I can't tell exactly what it was. I was experimenting with an auth service for my self hosted stuff, to not deal with several accounts and rights systems. This service was the first one which I wanted to switch and they didn't wanted to support it, leaving me with the standard login.
A lot of motherfuckers typing in code with a keyboard need a beating with said keyboard.
If a programmer can’t get a login form right they need permabanned from ever shipping another release.
On the other end, there is an excessive use of 2FA with systems for whom the concept of SSO seems to be a foreign thing. It's also sort of funny that 2FA can just mean using a TOTP capable password manager, reverting it back to one factor.
It's not actually reduced to one factor, just a single point of failure. If their password manager gets taken it's a problem, however the generated TOTP is worthless in 1 min. So this will protect the login from cases where the password is known like a compromised website or a reused password.
My email uses greylisting which is where the first email received from a server gets a "busy" response - the idea being that spammers just fire and forget whereas real mailers will retry.
Unfortunately, some senders take so long to resend that it's timed out. The second time will work though. Unless they have multiple servers. Some have so many servers that you have to do this a multitude of times until you lose the will to login or forget what you were going to do anyway.
But you know what’s the safest way for us to keep your password safe? Not asking for one to begin with. By not creating a password with us you have no risk of it leaking, and we don’t have to deal with the responsibility of keeping it secure. The sign in link is going to your email, which presumably is protected with two-factor authentication, if you have it set up (which you should!).
https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/
They had a follow up later too (paywall)
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