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I know something that isn't two-factor authentication

Posted by: admin 12 years, 6 months ago

William Edwards wrote a post entitled "I know someone whose 2-factor phone authentication was hacked…" about a friend whose bank account was drained by fraudsters. His bank relied on a dial-back system. The attackers social-engineered BT to re-route the phone calls. This attack is eerily similar to the recent attack on Cloudflare, which started with an attack on an AT&T account.

I agree with almost everything in the post, except this: a dial-back verification systems is not two-factor authentication. It's been clear to me that the term "two-factor authentication" is showing its age. In many ways I prefer the term "strong authentication" because it implies that you are increasing the strength around authentication. And it leads us to this:

In order for an authentication mechanism to be considered strong, it must rely upon cryptographic proof of possession of the authentication factors.

There is no cryptography in a dial-back system. There is no provable encryption in SMS. These systems may be better than a static password, but they are not strong!

If your authentication system falls back to a system that doesn't rely on secure systems, then it is not strong. It's the old cliché about weakest links.

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