Either by sending a code to SMS or Email, you are able to sign into your account without ever needing to or being able to add a password. Why has this become a thing recently?
Which services? I haven’t stumbled upon a single one
gg ez ease of use feature, which is hilarious because that’s exactly where smishing attacks come in. People are actually more willing to give out the OTP than their actual password, so it definitely less secure.
I think this started out as a decently good idea, like sign in with a device type of feature (think QR code from an authenticated device), but then along the way someone just went “screw it” and changed it to an OTP.
Even in 2025 password managers are rare, people still reuse the same 8 character password everywhere, and people fall for low effort scams. So someone thought “if they’re gonna be insecure anyway, lets just make it so they never have to use a password and sync it to their phone or email”.
i have no proof, but im semi sure that this way you cannot sign up with a temp mail or temp sms, so you are kinda forced to use your real data, which means the site is selling your data
Just use temporary email addresses. Fastmail generates them for free with a button click, and doesnt share your real email.
You can generate one-time-use email addresses by using the little-know mailbox field of the email address format:
kepix+you_can_write_anything_here_and_it_will_reach_your_inbox@gmail.comObviously this will not fool a human being into thinking you are a different person, but I have never encountered authentication code that treats two mailboxes at the same address to be the same person. This is useful for identifying the source of data breaches, when you start getting phishing attacks at your “kepix+reddit.com@gmail.com” address, and makes it trivial to train your spam/important filters.
Too many big password breaches also occurred to me.
But that’s what MFA is there for, although they shouldn’t be using SMS as one of the possible factors - let alone the main one, as seems to be the case.
I think to reduce friction for gaining new users.
Personally I’m frustrated with always having to give a working phone number to accounts.
I have no idea if I’ve been at all successful in poisoning my data but all my accounts use unique generated emails in addition to generated passwords and fake profile info. It’s just habit now.
However all too often the one piece of real data I have to give is my phone number, and that would be really useful to cross-link all my accounts for data brokers building a dossier on me.
I have hundreds of fake emails but can create at most a couple phone numbers
Same situation for me. I’m hoping a forward thinking cell provider can develop something to combat this. I guess dummy phone numbers wouldn’t work, at least not in large cities since they already run out of phone numbers and have to invent new area codes. Maybe provide customers with unlimited extensions?
It can’t be that simple since you’d always be identifiable to anyone who knows the trick
I wonder if there’s a technical limitation to the number of extensions. If a number can have six or seven digit extensions perhaps someone could allocate those randomly, with forwarding to your real number
They’re offloading authentication to your email provider. It’s basically quick and cheap oauth. I think it’s because they’re trying to avoid being a vector for a data breach.
The irony being that putting all of a user’s eggs in one basket makes things far riskier for the user, and not less.
Smearing authentication credential data out across the entire Internet makes a sloppy user safer because the inevitable breeches that come with being sloppy are contained, but it increases the demands on a safe user while also increasing their attack surface. Though such a user does typically have a single point of failure in the form of their own sloppy password management.
Outsourcing the securiry risk to a third-party
Yup. “That’s not on me! Your email was compromised! That’s between your email provider and you!”
It is coding for the lowest common denominator of user – those who use the same easily-guessable password for everything. Making them click a link to login is honestly better security.
Of course there should be an option for those of us who have a TOTP app and use a password manager.
Can’t brain today, I have the dumb. What’s TOTP, other than that BBC show?
Time based one time passwords. Those (usually) six digit codes which get replaced every 30 seconds or so. During setup you copied the secret to your device (usually smartphone) and now your device and the server you authenticate at can calculate the same secret code every thirty seconds.
Which reminds me: I just got a new phone and totally forgot about Authenticator apps
I was able to recover one but the other is lost and I still need to get those accounts reset
Adding a shameless plug here: Aegis is available on f-droid and allows you to backup your 2FA secrets on your own server (e.g. own nextcloud) in case you don’t trust the default Google authenticator.
I’m due to rebuild my lab this winter so I’ll make sure to take a look
I’m due to rebuild my lab this winter…
Famous last words before emerging 3 years later.
Can’t be liable for theft if there were no locks?
well, in case of sending an email with a temporary access code it’s not different than using the “forgot password” link
From my experience things like this are not important services. they are things where I keep the password in an online password service which I won’t do for anything important.
I hate the SMS ones, because I don’t have a good phone signal in my home, so I have to ruin around trying to get a couple of bars so I can get the effing code. My banking app just uses a fingerprint.
Check out if your router and provider supports SIP. It allows sms and calls over your wifi connection
No, is the answer. Moving to another ISP when my plan runs out. I’m paying extra for a VoIP line and want to move to WiFi calling.
Because people don’t realize how ridiculously insecure SMS and (usually unencrypted) email are.
It’s just kids who never had a mentor.
It’s an immediate red flag for me.
I’m paranoid so I view passkeys and similar streamlined login mechanisms as a way to make it easy for police to access your entire digital life once they unlock your phone.
This is why manufacturers started pushing biometric unlocking so hard. Once someone has access to your person and phone they no longer need PINs or passwords to gain access to everything.
If a service were going to passkeys for sake of law enforcement or works be so much easier for them to just comply with bypassing auth to access the user data altogether. Passkey implementations originally only supported very credible offline mechanisms and only relaxed those requirements when it became clear the vast majority of people couldn’t handle replacing their devices with passkeys.
For screen lock for the common person it was either that or nothing at all. So demanding a PIN only worked because most of the time the user didn’t have to deal with it owing to touching a fingerprint or face unlock.
People hate passwords and mitigate that aggravation by giving random Internet forum the same password as their bank account. I wouldn’t want to take user passwords because I know I have a much higher risk of a compromise somehow leading to compromise of actually important accounts elsewhere.
Most phone OSes now have a “lockdown mode” which temporarily disables biometric authentication until you use a PIN to unlock it.
For me, the lockdown mode is on the shutdown menu that you get of you hold the lock button for a few seconds. (I have stock android on Pixel 7). Alyernatively, I could hold the power button surreptitiously until the phone reboots, requiring my PIN to unlock it.
