The least secure part of the sign-in process is the person. It doesn’t matter what the 2FA method is.
You can be using a one time pin and someone can look at your paper and see the next one. Someone can trick your grandma into giving out the Google authenticator pin over the phone because “they’re from Google”. Someone can trick you into making the financial transfer yourself because “you’re getting a deal”.
Which is why sms-based 2fa is useless if you’re being targeted by a motivated hacker. If you’re an important person (e.g. a government official, an exec on a big corp, a celebrity, etc) it’s not safe to use sms-based 2fa. Heck, even if you’re nobody, a hacker might decided to target you anyway to access the company you’re currently working at, or because you have something they want (e.g. a desirable Twitter handle). One call to your cellphone carrier to complain about losing phone, with some social engineering skill to dupe the minimum wage call center worker who doesn’t really care about being vigilant, and suddenly the hacker gain access to your cellphone number (doubly easier to with e-sim) and thus your sms-based 2fa.
Although it’s true that you are increasing the attack surface when compared to locally stored OTP keys, in the context of OTPs, it doesn’t matter. It still is doing it’s job as the second factor of authentication. The password is something you know, and the OTP is something you have (your phone/SIM card).
I would argue it is much worse what 1Password and Bitwarden (and maybe others?) allows the users to do. Which is to have the both the password and the OTP generator inside the same vault. For all intents and purposes this becomes a single factor as both are now something you know (the password to your vault).
That’s not quite right though, there’s the factor you know (password to your vault), and the factor you have (a copy of the encrypted vault).
That would be true for offline vaults, but for services hosted on internet I don’t think so. Assuming the victim does not use 2FA on their Bitwarden account, all an attacker needs is the victim’s credentials (email and password). Once you present the factor you know, the vault is automatically downloaded from their services.
This is something I hadn’t thought until know, but I guess password managers might(?) change the factor type from something you know (the password in your head) to something you have (the vault). At which point, if you have 2FA enabled on other services, you are authenticating with 2 things you have, the vault and your phone.
Assuming the victim does not use 2FA on their Bitwarden account
A pretty tall assumption given that we’re already talking about someone who knows to turn on 2FA for other things. If someone knows about 2FA and password managers, they’d be insane not to have 2FA set up on the password manager itself.
That’s a fair point. I just wanted to highlight that there may be cases where a password manager isn’t automatically protected by 2FA by the two factors you mentioned (The password you know and the copy of the vault) since in the case of bitwarden fulfilling one can give you the second. In order to actually achieve 2FA in this case, you would need to enable OTPs.
No and stop using SMS it’s not secure.
The least secure part of the sign-in process is the person. It doesn’t matter what the 2FA method is.
You can be using a one time pin and someone can look at your paper and see the next one. Someone can trick your grandma into giving out the Google authenticator pin over the phone because “they’re from Google”. Someone can trick you into making the financial transfer yourself because “you’re getting a deal”.
Sim swapping
Which is why sms-based 2fa is useless if you’re being targeted by a motivated hacker. If you’re an important person (e.g. a government official, an exec on a big corp, a celebrity, etc) it’s not safe to use sms-based 2fa. Heck, even if you’re nobody, a hacker might decided to target you anyway to access the company you’re currently working at, or because you have something they want (e.g. a desirable Twitter handle). One call to your cellphone carrier to complain about losing phone, with some social engineering skill to dupe the minimum wage call center worker who doesn’t really care about being vigilant, and suddenly the hacker gain access to your cellphone number (doubly easier to with e-sim) and thus your sms-based 2fa.
Although it’s true that you are increasing the attack surface when compared to locally stored OTP keys, in the context of OTPs, it doesn’t matter. It still is doing it’s job as the second factor of authentication. The password is something you know, and the OTP is something you have (your phone/SIM card).
I would argue it is much worse what 1Password and Bitwarden (and maybe others?) allows the users to do. Which is to have the both the password and the OTP generator inside the same vault. For all intents and purposes this becomes a single factor as both are now something you know (the password to your vault).
That’s not quite right though, there’s the factor you know (password to your vault), and the factor you have (a copy of the encrypted vault).
Admittedly, I don’t use that feature either, but, it’s not as bad as it seems at first glance.
That would be true for offline vaults, but for services hosted on internet I don’t think so. Assuming the victim does not use 2FA on their Bitwarden account, all an attacker needs is the victim’s credentials (email and password). Once you present the factor you know, the vault is automatically downloaded from their services.
This is something I hadn’t thought until know, but I guess password managers might(?) change the factor type from something you know (the password in your head) to something you have (the vault). At which point, if you have 2FA enabled on other services, you are authenticating with 2 things you have, the vault and your phone.
A pretty tall assumption given that we’re already talking about someone who knows to turn on 2FA for other things. If someone knows about 2FA and password managers, they’d be insane not to have 2FA set up on the password manager itself.
That’s a fair point. I just wanted to highlight that there may be cases where a password manager isn’t automatically protected by 2FA by the two factors you mentioned (The password you know and the copy of the vault) since in the case of bitwarden fulfilling one can give you the second. In order to actually achieve 2FA in this case, you would need to enable OTPs.