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zahlman 4 days ago

> U2F/Webauthn key as second factor is phishing-proof. TOTP is not.

Last I checked, we're still in a world where the large majority of people with important online accounts (like, say, at their bank, where they might not have the option to disable online banking entirely) wouldn't be able to tell you what any of those things are, and don't have the option to use anything but SMS-based TOTP for most online services and maybe "app"-based (maybe even a desktop program in rare cases!) TOTP for most of the rest. If they even have 2FA at all.

ameliaquining 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is the point of the "passkey" branding. The idea is to get to the point where these alphabet-soup acronyms are no longer exposed to normal users and instead they're just like "oh, I have to set up a passkey to log into this website", the way they currently understand having to set up a password.

zahlman 4 days ago | parent [-]

Sure. That still doesn't make Yubikey-style physical devices (or desktop keyring systems that work the same way) viable for everyone, everywhere, though.

ameliaquining 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, the pressure needs to be put on vendors to accept passkeys everywhere (and to the extent that there are technical obstacles to this, they need to be aggressively remediated); we're not yet at the point where user education is the bottleneck.

cataflam 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed.

At least the crowd here should _know_ that TOTP doesn't do anything against phishing, and most of the critical infrastructure for code and other things support U2F so people should use it.