It’s time to stop using SMS for security

https://lucky225.medium.com/its-time-to-stop-using-sms-for-anything-203c41361c80

by andyjih_ • 5 years ago

174 147 5 years ago

lucky225.medium.com

tjs8rj• 5 years ago

Why is this a download?

My covid project was an SMS news API completely controllable from your phone and delivers short news summaries on any topic scraped from across the web (www.zipnews.io). While fun and it has several paying customers, the SMS can be somewhat expensive to send. The strength is that everyone with a connected cell phone can access the API.

givehimagun• 5 years ago

My bank (USAA) decided to switch their 2FA away from SMS a while ago. They only do email or the USAA app auth code. I love it and I feel much safer with them because of it. Let's do start to move away - yes!

177tcca• 5 years ago

Should be optional.

I feel equally threatened by a potentially weak bank app running on my phone all the time as I would my carrier giving away the keys to the castle.

boring_twenties2• 5 years ago

If only there were any perfectly good open standards for 2FA that were implemented by numerous free apps and/or secure hardware tokens...

stonogo• 5 years ago

It is optional. I'm a USAA customer as well, here's a screenshot from thirty seconds ago: https://i.imgur.com/boA4dc1.png

bawolff7• 5 years ago

Email is much worse than SMS.

akvadrako• 5 years ago

It could be better if the sender's SMTP server forced the use of TLS. Most emails are now sent encrypted but it isn't usually enforced.

If your control your own receiving server then it would be hard for someone to intercept the message.

grep_name• 5 years ago

What did they switch to? I've been wanting to use my u2f token for my bank account for awhile but haven't seen any that support that yet

lholden• 5 years ago

The URL is giving an empty page for me, so I'm afraid I can't really comment on the content of the article itself.

With that said, people should fear any site/service that uses SMS for anything security related. SMS 2fa is a fairly common vector for compromise.

It can be nice for a "data feed" though. Like, getting an update on the status of your delivery driver. Though, this can also be really annoying when say... your old college starts spamming you with stuff... which I got to experience this weekend at 1am. :)

slovette• 5 years ago

So, I work in telecom and dabble a bit in software.

I don’t understand the hatred for SMS 2FA on HN. Can someone explain to me why SMS is such a bad method comparative to other solutions where the practical user adoption is near impossible at scale?

At some point, software is going to need to bend to the way people work. When does that happen instead of obsessing over ubiquitous “zero trust”.

I’d love a parable of how using SMS as part of a layered security verification is somehow unacceptably vulnerable.

supermatt2• 5 years ago

I don’t think anyone hates SMS 2FA in general, just that it is susceptible to MITM attacks (snooping/interception) than other solutions (device, key, app) as is made clear in this article.

I note, however, that this attack seems to only be possible on VOIP routable numbers, and it’s my experience that banks, etc, will not allow you to use VOIP routable numbers for 2FA. That’s definitely not the case for a naive implementation of sms 2fa as would be done by likely any dev using Twilio, etc.

zapdrive• 5 years ago

I hate sms because most 2FA services don't deliver to VoIP numbers.

supermatt2• 5 years ago

Further reading suggests this isn’t just voip numbers!

pabs3• 5 years ago

Probably the SIM porting attacks, where telco employees are vulnerable to being socially engineered to letting an attacker port your phone number over to another device. Also this new attack, which is more stealthy.

michael_j_x• 5 years ago

But that is not really true for most countries. In my country, to get a sim ported you need to go to the shop and present your identification.

eythian2• 5 years ago

Some countries resolve the porting issue by having a list of numbers that have been ported, so that banks (for example) can check that and not rely on it if the port happened in the past two weeks (also, for example.)

tzs• 5 years ago

Or even porting accidents. If anything goes wrong when you are switching carriers and intentionally having your number ported to the new carrier, you could be left with a non-working number until you get it resolved (which can be difficult because your phone is no longer working...).

And even if nothing goes wrong, it can take up to a day for the number to port in the US. That's a day without being about to login to anyplace that requires SMS 2FA.

A TOTP app on my phone, on the other hand, works fine regardless of whether or not my phone number currently works with the SIM in that phone.

devwastaken• 5 years ago

SMS is not secure, that's why. Police have used special devices to intercept messages on a broad scale without any warrent, which means individuals can too. Service providers are well known to send "replacement" sim cards out to people who then use it to access 2FA accounts. Happened to H3H3 on YouTube.

Phone numbers in general are insecure. There is no enforced verification system - people can receive calls from their own phone number, and people can fake the presented numbers. There is such a significant amount of spam callers as well. The FCC doesnt care.

The entire phone system in the U.S. needs to be remade with security, but powers that be really don't want that.

alickz• 5 years ago

Happened to H3H3 on YouTube

Also same attack vector used to get access to Jack Dorsey's Twitter account I believe.

bawolff7• 5 years ago

I dont think this is a one sided debate.

Pro: SMS 2FA is better than just passwords. In practise 2FA is primarily a hedge against credential surfing, with its other security properties more theoretical than practical, and it mostly works good enough for that use case. (Perfect is the enemy of good)

Con: there's lots of attacks related to social engineering the telecom into transfering your phone number. Real people have been compromised this way albeit this attack is pretty targeted.

There is also some concerns about evesdropping/mitm attacks. This is pretty unrealistic in my mind. If you're an on-path attacker for someone's cell phone convo that implies you have direct access to the victim, so the victim is pretty screwed regardless.

So in the end its a usability vs security tradeoff. Its a pretty close tradeoff so its not exactly a slam dunk in either direction.

_trampeltier• 5 years ago

No it's not better, it's worse. Because with SMS 2FA, you can most times reset the password and then everything is lost. With just a password and no SMS 2FA you can't just reset the password so easy.

PeterisP2• 5 years ago

While a password+SMS 2FA would be better than just password, the problem is that SMS often gets also turned into a single-factor password recovery mechanism; and SMS alone is worse security-wise than a decent password.

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

Pro: SMS 2FA is better than just passwords.

That's from the point of view of somebody trying a denial of service attack target at some user, right?

colechristensen• 5 years ago

There are several methods of hard and soft attack which are stupidly easy where ability to temporarily capture your phone number is the only necessary authentication factor.

SMS isn’t used as an additional layer but the only necessary layer to “recover” an account.

unscaled2• 5 years ago

This is not emphasized enough. Many companies enable SMS both as a second authentication factor AND a single-factor account recovery mechanism.

As bad as passwords, savvy users can use a password manager and generate unique high-entropy passwords, but if the web site is forcing SMS on you, you lose all that security and now have to rely on vulnerable telco infra that is out of your control and was never built to facilitate authentication.

quicklime• 5 years ago

I probably hate it for different reasons from others on HN, but I move countries (and change numbers) and travel a lot, and SMS just isn't a reliable way to reach me. On top of that, attempting to log in to a website from a foreign country is often itself a trigger for 2FA, and exactly the moment when I'm not reachable by SMS.

This has bitten me a few times, sometimes in desperate situations. Like when I've needed to log in to Airbnb to message a host, transfer some cash from my bank account, access my frequent flyer account, etc. Far too many sites don't provide 2FA over email, or through an app like Google Authenticator - they can only do it over SMS.

Yeah, I know I could set up roaming. But it's an easy thing to forget, since I change phone numbers every couple of years (for both personal and work phones). And it's not always cheap.

It's also just a huge pain to have to go through and change every account I have, any time I change numbers. A lot of accounts that I only use occasionally are configured with one of my many old phone numbers, which don't work anymore. This usually involves a call to tech support to fix it.

RileyJames• 5 years ago

Absolutely this. I currently have a document from my bank, that they emailed me. Which I’m suppose to print, write all my personal info on, plus a copy of my passport and FAX to them!!

All because I want to change my phone number, and I’m overseas.

Which I only need to change (or even have associated with my account at all) because they refuse to offer any other 2FA option.

chrismorgan4• 5 years ago

I’m an Australian that was in India for the last year (just arrived back, up to day 2 of my 14 day quarantine). Anything that has needed to verify me through SMS (e.g. filing my Australian tax return via myGov, paying for things with my credit card if they used the fancy security thing, like most airlines do and Amazon apparently does, and logging into one or two things) has required me to contact my parents to turn on and check the old phone I left with them, because roaming for a year is expensive and otherwise pointless (I barely use a phone), but transferring my number to a prepaid Amaysim SIM let me keep it alive and mine for the year for $10.

Actually, the myGov thing was a real piece of work. They offer secret questions as a second factor that you can opt to use instead of SMS codes (and yes, secret questions are stupid), but when I did that, it silently unlinked my Australian Tax Office account. I tried to link it up again (a bit of a pain in its own right), and it told me that ATO has decided that it won’t let you link it up if you use secret questions as the second factor technique. Seriously. So I had to switch back. Oh yeah, they do also have a third option, an app of their own that can generate codes (not TOTP), but that app had something like 2 stars on Google Play Store, with many reviews saying it didn’t work at all, so I didn’t even bother trying that.

When I’m in Australia with my phone handy, SMS verification seems not too bad, but when out of the country and not roaming, it may vary between very inconvenient and completely debilitating.

pentae• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, the only remedy to this i've found is to travel like james bond with two cell phones. I keep a second android phone with my 'back home' sim on the cheapest monthly plan possible and only turn it on to read sms codes. It really comes in handy when needing to sign up to a new service in your home country while abroad. Just don't forget to keep data roaming turned off

GhostVII2• 5 years ago

This is why I switched over to a VOIP number instead. SMS works everywhere I have internet, and if I have to I just pick up a data-only sim card for wherever I am. Can even check my messages online. Probably not as secure, and wouldn't work well if I was regularly calling people, but for the most part it works fine and costs $1 a month.

the_duke• 5 years ago

Why don't you just get a dedicated "virtual" phone number for this purpose? It's not expensive.

Skype is an obvious choice, but there are many other providers.

Then you have a stable number and can read SMS via app web UI.

I switched to the same method a few years ago. It's useful even if you don't travel much, just to not tie 2FA to your phone and for not giving all those services your real number.

dageshi• 5 years ago

I have also travelled a lot in the past...

You presumably do have a "home" country in the sense of where your bank accounts are, get a cheap permanent sim/phone no with roaming, buy the tiniest phone you can off amazon and stick it in as your 2factor permanent number.

Yes, you have to keep that phone charged, but your problem is now permanently solved, it's how I did it.

Andrew_nenakhov• 5 years ago

In russia it is common for authorities to temporary switch phone to another sim card, then switch it back without user even noticing it. This method was widely used to target dissidents and access their accounts.

To sum it, 2fa via sms gives only an illusion of safety.

ClumsyPilot3• 5 years ago

I think thats a different threat level, an app that manages shopping coupons doesnt need to worry about russian government taking their "10% off" code

bigiain• 5 years ago

You might want to ask some of your greybeard coworkers...

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for...

herbst6• 5 years ago

You never own the number. It could anytime go to someone else without notice (most contracts contain that line) and if you do not pay for only a few months its very likely someone else suddenly gets your 2fa.

Using phones is honestly a huge security issue

kabdib• 5 years ago

SMS 2FA costs money per message. It's also subject to telecom rules -- you usually need to buy short codes by geography if you're sending at scale, and that involves dealing with bureaucracies at scale, too. Getting a short code can take weeks and cost thousands of dollars. Of course you can always pay to have other people do that management for you. But you're going to pay, nonetheless.

Then you have to worry about fraud, and whether telcos in <random country> have been hacked, or are corrupt, and are leaking messages to bad guys.

I've seen entire (small) countries drop out, too. Usually the way you find out about this is that support notices an uptick in users in <smallish country> complaining about not getting messages, or you notice that the entirety of some geography isn't successfully completing the transactions you tried to protect with SMS. Er, you did consult the (changing) prefix database and phone number parser to (semi) reliably determine a geography from a phone number, right? Isn't parsing phone numbers fun?

It's fractally terrible and expensive, and I haven't even talked about APIs yet.

southerntofu2• 5 years ago

SMS 2FA costs money per message.

This is only because the telephone cartels control the networks. The same is more or less true of Internet. Operators have advocated for anti-open-wifi laws across the globe so they can sell their internet access plans (xDSL/3G), when we could have free networking for all in all places.

Seriously though, why couldn't we have FREE privacy-friendly networking as a public service?

heroprotagonist2• 5 years ago

Beyond it being insecure, I see it used too often as the only alternative to yet another proprietary MFA app.

Like Microsoft Authenticator. It wanted way too many permissions on my phone, and provided less security than my Yubikey authenticator. My yubikey provides a standard open OTP but requires the device to generate it (phone tap or plugin via USB to computer or phone).

Open standards are better. I don't want a different authenticator app for every website. It's so much simpler to use a single app.

corty3• 5 years ago

Microsoft Authenticator can be replaced by any app that does standard OTP, e.g. FreeOTP+.

sodality23• 5 years ago

TOTP is definitely an open standard. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238

sildur• 5 years ago

The hatred is because it costs 16 dollars to take over a number:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g8wb/hacker-got-my-texts-1...

mysterydip• 5 years ago

Even easier are the sites that do this: "Please enter the phone number where we should send your one-time 2FA code: [_______]"

I've had that happen on more than one site. Surely anyone who stole my password would just put in their own number?

ksec• 5 years ago

I actually love SMS 2FA ( And the rare few on HN ). It is the simplest form of 2FA that non-tech people will actually understand and use. Unless people want to argue 1FA is better than crappy 2FA.

SMS gets hatred especially in US because of how easy it is to socially engineer their way for SIM replacement or other SMS uses. Mostly because for unknown reason US has the absolute worst MNO in the world. In other places SMS replacement requires official forms to be filled as well as physical presence. It doesn't matter whether SMS is a form of 2FA of not, getting my SIM card without decent form of protection from Carrier is wrong in the first place.

And RCS doesn't seems / want / willing to replace SMS anytime soon. Carrier have little incentive to do so. It is backed by Google which means not everyone is on board including Apple. And GSMA has no intention to make a better SMS either.

Mauricebranagh• 5 years ago

Having built a system to handle SMS for a previous employer about 10 years ago the US's fractured mobile phone system did not help back then you could not reliably deliver SMS across systems.

Unfortunately yet another example of the US's poor regulation of telecoms receiver pays is another example.

corty3• 5 years ago

SMS has no security at all.

SMS is not properly encrypted over the air, GSM and UMTS encryption is broken and often misconfigured anyways. There is no way to check and no guarantee that a SMS will be transmitted in a safe encryption protocol, i.e. no way to force LTE. And given the level of brokenness in GSM and UMTS, I wouldn't rely too much on LTE or 5G crypto being worth anything. End-to-end encryption isn't provided anyways.

Also, phone numbers are not terribly secure either. The control protocol for mobile networks, SS7, is a steaming heap of excrement without any consideration for security. There are numerous ways to redirect SMS and calls into the hands of criminals, which have been demonstrated over and over by researchers. Also, this is regularly being abused by the police, secret services and criminals. As a customer, you are completely at the mercy of the phone network to do the proper mitigation dance because SS7 is inherently broken and cannot be fixed, just maybe firewalled off (a little, but not too much...): https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1449/

Then there is a whole lot of social engineering cases to take over numbers and SIM cards which others have described nearby.

With 2FA via a proper app or even open protocols like TOTP, I can verify and trust much more of the auth flow. Properly done, I only need to trust the endpoints and (maybe, if used, with TOTP even that is unnecessary) the TLS connection. With SMS, I need to trust a whole lot of telcos between the endpoints, their firewalls, IDSs, (mis-)configurations, all their service providers and their employees not to fiddle with things. And actually, all of the aforementioned have repeatedly proven untrustworthy by using broken, outdated, and known-to-be-insecure technology.

0xbadcafebee• 5 years ago

SMS is fine for 2FA for Reddit. It's not fine when it protects things that have financial repercussions. But that's when we actually need strong 2FA.

It's been proven time and again that cyber criminals frequently target people using SMS 2FA to steal from them. Most implementations of 2FA might as well be 1FA. People might even use worse passwords when they think 2FA protects them.

I think the adoption of SMS as a "universal 2FA" was not worth it. We should've just gotten people used to the less easy but more secure methods. U2F bluetooth keyfob on my keychain would be good enough for my phone and PC. Remote access seems like the hardest nut to crack.

tomjen3• 5 years ago

SMS 2f is only used to collect phone numbers. There is already an open standard called TOTP that people can use, and which requires no special access and isn't locked to any PII.

simonebrunozzi• 5 years ago

Here's a parable, from personal experience [0].

TL;DR: my mobile phone number (not the phone itself) was hacked, then my Twitter account. The attacker changed my Twitter handle from @simon to @simonsw9kww.

I eventually recovered my @simon twitter account, after several MONTHS and several emails and calls to twitter support and friends working at Twitter.

Is this enough for you?

[0] https://simon.medium.com/mobile-twitter-hacked-please-help-2...

jfrunyon2• 5 years ago

SMS is completely insecure. Not only can it be passively sniffed along the way, not only can malicious actors reroute your number, not only can pretty much any employee at your telco access it, not only can pretty much any employee at your telco get tricked into rerouting it, but by default (and therefore for the vast majority of users), it'll show up while the phone is locked!

It's equivalent to taping your key to your back door. Sure, someone has to go to your back door first to see it, but then they're in.

dkersten• 5 years ago

SMS is not at all secure. My first out-of-uni programming job was working on SMS value-add services for mobile networks (mostly anti-spam, anti-fraud, anti-spoofing type stuff and roam steering, but also parental controls and other stuff). It was crazy what weird things we could bend the network to. Obviously, our services ran on the network itself, so had more access than a typical end user, but the protocols have zero built in security, everything on the network was totally open, spoofing is trivial (we could detect much of it with our software, but definitely not all -- mostly all we could do was consistency checks, but if you carefully crafted a fake packet, there's nothing we could do). As others have stated, the over-the-air encryption is often.. not good.. so getting access SMS like we had seems very possible. And since its not end-to-end encrypted, a bad actor within the network could also trivially access messages (we could! we even intercepted some of our own messages for testing, it would have been a simple regex to read other people's messages).

This was ~15 years ago, but I doubt much has changed.

grey-area• 5 years ago

I’d love a parable of how using SMS as part of a layered security verification is somehow unacceptably vulnerable.

The article gives plenty of examples. Here they are as links:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a37epb/t-mobile-alert-victim... https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyezmn/we-were-warned-about-... https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg7bd4/how-a-hacker-can-take... https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g8wb/hacker-got-my-texts-1...

The latest is the most severe, in summary - a gaping flaw in SMS lets hackers take over phone numbers in minutes by simply paying a company to reroute text messages.

So if you insert SMS 2FA in your security chain as a fallback authentication method, you're leaving it wide open to exploits and none of your other 2FA security like TOTP or tokens matters, because the attacker can just take over a customer/admin account using the SMS authentication to prove they are the user concerned then change those methods. In some cases you'll require an email as well, and in some you'll manage to send an email to that old email address before it can be changed, but many places don't, particularly mobile apps tend to rely on the phone number, and most people don't monitor every email address 24/7, so lots of damage can be done in a short period.

SMS really needs to be fixed and it's really debatable whether it adds security or subtracts security in the meantime, even in a layered approach.

mooreds• 5 years ago

I wrote up a long article on a number of ways to do MFA. https://fusionauth.io/learn/expert-advice/authentication/mul...

In looking around, a few things became clear:

   * the tech industry hates SMS
   * there are some common social engineering and a few network level attacks that SMS allows
   * it's widely deployed and supported
   * it's a heck of a lot better than nothing

I think the title of the original article is a bit absurd. That's like saying "It's time to stop using passwords for security." Sure, you can say that, but your grandma will still have a sticky note of passwords next to her computer.

Defense in depth without relying entirely on the user to secure their systems makes a lot of sense to me.

Ban SMS if you aren't worried about adoption of MFA (for example, because you are a corporation and can mandate TOTP). Otherwise find ways to work with it.

jjav2• 5 years ago

As the article explains, SMS is just plain insecure. So attempting to rely on it for MFA is worse than nothing (worse, because it allows attackers to lock out legitimate user).

Ignoring security (not that we should), it's just a massive pain from a pragmatic point of view. As others note, right when an SMS MFA is triggered is most of the time when I can't receive an SMS, so everything breaks when I actually need access.

Much easier solutions exist today at more convenient adoption at scale, like email and TOTP.

fomine3• 5 years ago

Yahoo! Japan, One of the most famous website in Japan, forces users to use insane auth method: SMS 1FA. It even accepts phone number as login ID. This is really stupid.

Arkanosis• 5 years ago

EDF, the largest electricity provider in Europe does the same in France. Actually, it even manages to do a bit worse: 1FA using SMS or email, but choice is left to the potential attacker.

I've spent countless hours trying to explain them the issue in 2019 and gave up as nobody cared.

neolefty• 5 years ago

What's the incentive for attackers?

unscaled2• 5 years ago

It's a rather recent thing, and it's touted as a security feature. To be fair, Japan seems to be safer than most of the world when it SIM swapping (there are pretty strict identification requirements defined by law) and for porting phone numbers between SIM cards. I also never heard of any case of attacks against SS7 or other part of the telecommunication stack in Japan (I'd be happy to know if someone does)

That being said, a certain class of SIM cards (SMS-only cards, without voice functionality) is exempt from most of these strict checks as far as I know, and there are other technical vulnerabilities that are probably just waiting to happen in Japan before they're taking seriously.

I'm a little bit surprised that Yahoo! Japan went for SMS as the only authentication method, since their one of the main sponsors of the FIDO Japan WG.

dgellow3• 5 years ago

Living in Germany, I don't remember the last time I used an SMS. When I was in south-east Asia I don't think I ever used SMS, it was always Line (or WeChat in China) or email. Is there a reason SMS are so much in use in the US but not in other parts of the world?

colordrops• 5 years ago

US was the last to start using SMS and will apparently be the last to stop. The US was behind the curve because it was one of the few places in the world where local calls were free so people didn't bother with SMS for a long time. As for why it's still here, my guess is that the messaging space is extremely fractured here and it's the only text messaging someone is guaranteed to receive.

calvano915• 5 years ago

And SMS was stupidly expensive like 10 cents a message for years. It wasn't quickly adopted because it was not a good value.

erfgh• 5 years ago

Not all people have or want smartphones.

realusername• 5 years ago

Don't know about the US but I haven't seen anybody using classic GSM for years now...

TMWNN• 5 years ago

US mobile plans gave enormous buckets (thousands) of SMS messages a month to mobile users 10-15 years ago, so there was little incentive to move to other mobile messaging systems.

Conversely, the lack of such generous SMS allotments in most non-US countries drove widespread adoption of WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger/etc.

jfktktmgn2• 5 years ago

I think is because of Apple iMessage, since a lot of Americans gave iPhone and they use iMessage, which sends SMS when the phone on the other end is not an iPhone.

baxtr• 5 years ago

I don't think that's true though. Maybe you haven't SEND any, but I bet you receive a lot. At least I do: from my bank, from some of my bank accounts, from my mobile service provider, from my parcel delivery service. From Coinbase, from PayPal... The list goes on and on.

WA• 5 years ago

I live in Germany. Only SMS I receive nowadays is from PayPal. For whatever reason they use it arbitrarily in addition to the other 2FA I set up.

Banks all have their own 2FA apps.

dgellow3• 5 years ago

So, I just checked, during the past ~6 months I got the following:

- Clubhouse invite

- A security code from a trading exchange

- My mobile internet provider telling me I reached 80% of my monthly data budget

- A few codes to validate my phone number when creating new accounts on platforms

And that's basically it.

jan_g• 5 years ago

It's still used a lot also in Europe for OTP codes (banking and such), as well as for shops/deliveries, where they send an SMS for order status changes (shipped from the warehouse, in transit, ...).

dgellow3• 5 years ago

Since PSD2 every German bank I know moved to 2fa mobile applications instead of SMS, I expected the same for the rest of the EU. I'm quite sure that delivery company also work with emails (at least that's the case of DHL, UPS, DPD, etc, they always send me notifications via emails).

eingaeKaiy8ujie2• 5 years ago

SMS is a standard and easy way to send/receive messages without using incompatible messaging apps owned by third parties. And the only way for me (except email) since I don't use Android or iOS.

Semaphor• 5 years ago

I also live in Germany. I don’t want to get some extra service tied to my phone number, so contact with people is via sms if it has to be mobile, E-Mail otherwise.

herbst6• 5 years ago

I am in Switzerland and half of web services ask for a sms confirmation these days. Its not an US issue

nindalf• 5 years ago

Not even niche web services. Yesterday Amazon insisted I tell them the code they sent to a phone I haven’t owned in 5 years.

ACS_Solver• 5 years ago

The good thing about SMS is that it's standard. I live in Sweden, just about everyone has a smartphone. SMS is still common for things like package delivery notifications or other service notifications, SMS is still an option for many transport tickets, though being phased out in favor of app solutions.

SMS works whether you're on iOS or Android, it works for the few users of classic phones, it works if you don't currently have mobile data, etc. It's not a secure method of communication and has other flaws, but it's the most reliable one if you don't know anything about the recipient. Whether they're using their beloved Siemens S35 or the latest Android flagship, they can receive a SMS.

javier123454321• 5 years ago

Yeah honestly, it's a shame that every one of these services (whatsapp, signal, telegram, ...) dont operate on a protocol like smtp. Its completely unnecessary to recreate a chat protocol every time it gets implemented. Here we are though, and exactly the thing you are expecting is happening, several competitors that don't interact with each other so even if I want to delete WhatsApp, I still keep it to reach family and friends elsewhere.

indymike• 5 years ago

In the US, most cell phone users are on unlimited voice/text plans. There is no cost to most consumers for sending and receiving SMS in the US. Also, the Line / What's App / WeChat equivalent in the US is Facebook Messenger. That is how sms has won.

nottorp• 5 years ago

Tbh I haven't heard of SMS hijacking in Europe either.

Is this an american thing, like SSN identity theft?

Or checks... let's not forget checks...

sleepyhead• 5 years ago

I assume it is a lot easier in the US. Here in Norway it is still possible as well though, there was a media showcase about it a few years ago. But that is mostly due to lack of security measures by the telco (we have a national auth method that could be used).

jfktktmgn2• 5 years ago

When dis medium become a paywalled site?

Do writers on it know that you can only read 3 articles before you are required to create an account and login? (like pinterest)

sgift• 5 years ago

Use a private window to get around this. It's not a very advanced mechanic (yet).

eingaeKaiy8ujie2• 5 years ago

Cookie Auto Delete solves the issue

selfhoster11• 5 years ago

The title is misleading. This is not in fact "stop using SMS for anything", but "stop using SMS for security purposes". There is a great reason why SMS should still be in use: nothing interoperable exists with an equal adoption rate. I will not rehash the usual argument about WeChat and Whatsapp, there is plenty of discussion about them.

herbst6• 5 years ago

As someone who does not keep a fixed phone number this reality really sucks. But i dont want security trough something i dont own, and there is no way to actually own a phone number

sdfhbdf• 5 years ago

The link is pointing to 0 content length page with no content type header so it behaves weirdly in for example Safari trying to download.

eythian2• 5 years ago

In firefox for me, it's just a blank page and the headers returned seem mostly to be from cloudflare rather than medium.

fwn• 5 years ago

The website does not currently work for me. Here's a working archive.org mirror:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210316074533/https://lucky225....

If that mirror keeps hiding the text, blocking all inline scripts with uBlock Origin solved it for me.

zimbatm• 5 years ago

Did anybody experiment using Twillio (or similar) to receive 2FA SMS?

There are a few service that I use that mandate or only provide SMS as a 2FA. Using Twillio seems rather ideal since they have stricter control to porting numbers. The message probably is harder to intercept as well since it goes to their servers directly. And finally the phone number is harder for an attacker to find out since it's not my day-to-day number.

Jenk• 5 years ago

A few of my employers use(d) Twilio for 2FA SMS, one of whom are UK FCA regulated.

Nextgrid• 5 years ago

A lot of services reject numbers from known VoIP providers as a way to reject fraud (and I guess prevent people from defeating number-based marketing/advertising tracking by using unique numbers?).

You can work around that by using lesser-known providers. In the UK, Andrews & Arnold (https://www.aa.net.uk) provide UK mobile numbers which don't seem to be rejected by anything.

closeparen• 5 years ago

It’s about making bans for fraud and abuse more expensive to repeatedly evade. The expected value of a few extra spam messages is lower than the cost of a new number.

4lun• 5 years ago

I tried this for a bit, but it turned out a number of services (Google, Facebook) would fail (silently) when sending an SMS to Twilio numbers.

It might no longer be true as there was a Twilio support page that confirmed this behaviour but is now just a 404[0] (though you can see a mention of it on StackOverflow[1])

[0] https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223134367-Sendi... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/55852784

ddevault2• 5 years ago

For the love of God, stop using Medium. I don't understand how authors don't know better by now.

tony0x02• 5 years ago

Why?

ddevault2• 5 years ago

https://l.sr.ht/XhOm.png

If you actually want people to read your content, then don't put it on Medium. Not to mention that it's bloated as hell, requires JavaScript, burns batteries on mobile devices, and is full of loathesome spyware software.

john-doe• 5 years ago

“It’s time to stop using Medium for anything”

upofadown• 5 years ago

"Identity management is hard. I know, let's just let the phone company deal with it!"

Later...

"Oh no! The phone company is doing a terrible job of solving our identity issue!"

It’s time to stop using SMS for security

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