Flaw has Microsoft Authenticator overwriting MFA accounts, locking users out

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3480918/design-flaw-has-microsoft-authenticator-overwriting-mfa-accounts-locking-users-out.html

by miles • 2 years ago

497 311 2 years ago

csoonline.com

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 2 years ago

Incidentally, this is why SMS MFA is so popular with users despite its security vulnerabilities.

Generally, unless you are targeted by someone with a sim swap, it is good enough. Most people won't be targeted, but do have a good chance of something going wrong that makes them lose their MFA key.

SoftTalker5• 2 years ago

Yep. It's simple, and almost everyone understands it. Like passwords themselves. Also the reason more secure approaches such as YubiKeys have never taken off in the general public -- they are just cumbersome and confusing.

leftbehind2• 2 years ago

We haven't had any issue getting all of our staff -- nontechnical users alike -- on yubikeys. As part of education we skip the PKI portion and just point out that it is "like your physical house key. You plug it in and touch it to turn the key to unlock"

JackSlateur• 2 years ago

Most importantly: yubikeys must be bought

peanut-walrus• 2 years ago

Honestly, the only way I see forward is FIDO with dirt cheap NFC cards as keys. Need to log in to somewhere? Get the card from your wallet and touch it to your phone/laptop. It has to be cheap enough that for any company with paying customers it makes more sense to physically mail them a card if they don't already have one than to support any alternative auth methods.

Most services won't even need a second layer of auth, if someone steals your wallet - do they really care about your reddit account?

immibis• 2 years ago

I've tried enabling it two times. The first time my phone permanently broke immediately after enabling it. The second time it was stolen. Now I just rely on randomly generated passwords.

SoftTalker5• 2 years ago

"This is a small example of a big problem with usability and cybersecurity. This is what happens when apps are developed by engineers who don’t have a strong knowledge of customers"

This really rings true. Just think of all the nonsense you have to deal with in the name of "security." Mandatory password change intervals. Insane rules for constructing passwords. Completely undocumented password requirements that you just have to figure out by trial and error. Complicated error messages full of security jargon. "Secret Questions" that you can't remember the answers to. And on the other side of the coin, the security of these systems themselves is like a sieve. So many data breaches, information disclosures, they are in the news almost daily. I often wonder how they get away with it all.

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

This isn't engineers doing that. It's CYA IT cyber policies.

SahAssar2• 2 years ago

Sure, but a lot of engineers aren't completely blameless. They should push back and explain why these are bad choices just like I would expect a building engineer to say to me that cardboard is not the ideal load bearing element for my skyscraper.

If the company still pushes forward with bad choices its on them, but they should be clearly informed how and why those choices are bad.

vips7L• 2 years ago

All in the name of audit check boxes.

meroes2• 2 years ago

So far https://studentaid.gov/ is the worst I've come across (I don't want to enter fake info^ and I can't duplicate my account to double check the requirements). From memory it was something like:

1) No words! 2) Can't reuse last 24 passwords 3) Excludes some special characters 4) 5 Security questions 5-10) Several other password requirements

Are the security questions case sensitive? Who knows.

^ "I understand that I’ll be required to certify that the information I provide to create an account is true and correct and that I’m the individual I claim to be. If I’m not the person I claim to be, I understand that I’m not authorized to proceed and that I should exit this form now. If I provide false or misleading information, I understand that I might be subject to a fine, prison time, or both."

lostlogin4• 2 years ago

If I provide false or misleading information, I understand that I might be subject to a fine, prison time, or both

Enter your password wrong and you're off to jail?

wizzwizz4• 2 years ago

Hopefully "Fakename Q Notarealperson" won't get me arrested… Here's the password help message:

---

Your password must be 8 to 30 characters in length and must contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, and one number.

Your password is case-sensitive.

You can’t use personal identifiers such as your first or last name, date of birth, or Social Security number in your password.

---

Here are some error codes the API returns:

  ["NULL_USERNAME", "NULL_EMAIL", "PWD_ILLEGAL_CHARACTERS", "PWD_CONTAINS_SPACE", "NULL_CHALLENGE_QAS"]

The UI doesn't expose the password error codes. It just says “You entered an invalid response. For more info, select the help (?) icon.” (The NULL_USERNAME and NULL_EMAIL errors seem to be spurious in this context.)

globalise83• 2 years ago

Stud3ntA1d24 here we come!

tetrep• 2 years ago

Just think of all the nonsense you have to deal with in the name of "security."

Well, the good news is that everything you listed is known as a bad idea to both end users and people who understand security (which is, sadly, not most people who implement security policies).

Using 4 or more dictionary words provides excellent password security and you can do the same for all of your security answers too. There's a variety of free and paid for password managers that solve the issue of trying to remember all your secrets (great for backing up 2FA secrets too).

I'm not sure what you mean by "complicated error messages" but I assume it's errors that they expect the user to fix themselves, otherwise they could return a generic nonspecific error and a unique ID for you to provide when you contact support to get help. While it sucks to get jargon spammed, I feel like pretty standard human ineptitude at explaining an error rather than anything specific to security. I also think it's how many people feel about any error message that contains computer jargon (PC LOAD LETTER!?!?).

I often wonder how they get away with it all.

My thinking (and experience...) is that most organizations are failing at a lot of things at any given time, even if the business overall is successful. Security is just one of those things. I wouldn't be surprised at a small elite organization not following that trend, but any sufficiently large organization is going to have incompetent people doing incompetent things.

Dylan168072• 2 years ago

Using 4 or more dictionary words provides excellent password security

I would not call 44-48 bits "excellent". It works if there's a good password hash being used, but if someone left PBKDF on basic settings then a GPU might be able to do 50 million guesses per second, or for a plain old salted hash 50 billion guesses per second.

tdiff3• 2 years ago

Is there actually some "professional consensus" on password reset policies (in form of report or journal article or something similar)? If someone could share, I'd love to refer to it in my org to stop resetting passwords every n months.

brookst2• 2 years ago

Completely undocumented password requirements that you just have to figure out by trial and error.

My favorite is:

1. I go to a website I haven’t used in a while but know I have an account on

2. I sign in with my email and what I’m sure is the right password for that site (algorithmically generated from site URL)

3. Password not valid

4. Ok, maybe this was an older version my my algorithm from way back

5. Password not valid

6. Fine, hit password reset

7. Get reset email and click it

8. Enter algorithmically generated password as new password

9. Error, can’t have that special character

10. Fine, per my rules, replace that special character with next one

11. Sorry, can’t reset password to your current password

12. Aaaaaargh.

rightbyte3• 2 years ago

This has bugged me a lot. Have I been gaslighted? Like, do sites lose my password? I can swear there have been like 10 occasions in the last 20 years where I had to reset my password where I am pretty sure I knew it.

Red_Leaves_Flyy• 2 years ago

You want a good one? Silent password truncation on account creation without a required relogin so on return my saved password doesn’t work and I need to reset it.

senectus1• 2 years ago

11. Sorry, can’t reset password to your current password

This sounds like an erronious error, ie the error message displayed is not the correct error message. There was definitely an error but the error was not that you tried the same password as your current.

I hate erronious errors with a vengance, because they not only break user workflow but they break helpdesk work flow as well then it gets escellated to an engineer who quite often cant fix the actual erronious error but knows what the actual issue is and fixes that anyway.. meaning the erronious error never gets fixed and will mow hang around to chew up everyones time all over again.

such a silly way to waste so much time, over and over.

usrusr• 2 years ago

Oh yes, you're not alone! That secret battle between "must have" character classes and "can't have" character classes is the bane of all mental password algorithms. Where do the "can't have" rules come from, anyways? Smells like not using hashing (and even then, those rules would still be weird). But it can get even better, when the site refuses to accept third level domain email addresses. Bonus points when it did, but at some point stopped.

SAI_Peregrinus2• 2 years ago

This is (part of) why we recommend password managers to people, not deterministic generation algorithms that still require keeping a list of logins with exceptions.

phatskat• 2 years ago

I’m on my sixth bank password at east because almost every time I go to reset it, I get the “can’t use current password” error despite trying all of my algorithmic passwords

jlarocco• 2 years ago

"This is what happens when apps are developed by engineers who don’t have a strong knowledge of customers"

I'd replace "engineers" with "product owners". I'm sure the engineers at Microsoft know some of the stuff they're doing is braindead and are unable to do anything about it.

surfingdino3• 2 years ago

It's likely that the subject of overwriting accounts has been discussed with business more than once, but the business are so stupid that they do not see it as a problem, or think that if anything goes wrong (as it inevitably will) they will loose their pension. So nothing changes. All software companies have an expiry date and Microsoft is a couple of decades past its own.

delecti• 2 years ago

My bank introduced "usernames" at some point, breaking login with email addresses, but didn't document this fact, or enforce that usernames not be set to email addresses. For a few months, every time I went to login, I had to use the "find my account" function, and each time I would again set my username to my email address (and why wouldn't I, it had been my login credential for nearly a decade by that point). At no point did it ever enforce a restriction on the @ or . in the username, until I went to login. It took me literal months to figure out and set it to something else.

This is Capital One by the way. My account was originally ING Direct, then Capital One 360, before being fully incorporated into the rest of their nonsense, and I assume that's related to the username situation.

EduardoBautista2• 2 years ago

At a Mexican bank, Banregio, there was a character limit to the username on mobile but not on web. So I originally had a username that was accepted at registration but not when I tried to log in on my phone and it wouldn’t allow me to input my entire username.

Edit: The issue was with the password field, not the username.

dilawar• 2 years ago

This is nothing.

My bank account (HDFC india) starts with 00. Dare send it to any accounting person who will copy paste it into an excel sheet and bang.. the prefix 00 is gone. Now they will complain that your account details are wrong. Took me a few months to figure out what was really going on.

hypercube33• 2 years ago

Up until a few years ago WF didn't process case in passwords. you could set your password to Hello and log in with hello

vonrosen2000• 2 years ago

I think Bank of America doesn't allow exclamation mark in password. It is strange. One of the largest banks on earth.

DarkUranium2• 2 years ago

My own bank used to have [A-Za-z0-9] passwords with a character limit + browser certificates. I thought the former was pretty bad (and it's always alarming, as it tends to imply they're storing it in plaintext if they even care what the characters are ...).

Then they got bought by another bank ... and now, they require *6-digit* PINs/passwords + no certificates. Yes, there's 2FA involved now, but seriously, 6 digits?

bongodongobob4• 2 years ago

Mandatory password change intervals.

Hasn't been best practice for a decade.

Insane rules for constructing passwords.

There needs to be a minimum standard. Generally length is enough, but the special character type stuff is annoying.

Completely undocumented password requirements that you just have to figure out by trial and error.

I haven't come across this.

Complicated error messages full of security jargon. "Secret Questions" that you can't remember the answers to.

That's a you problem.

Y'all complain about password breaches but want to use Mypassword69! for everything. Pick a lane.

smohare• 2 years ago

I encounter some bogus undocumented password constraints probably half the time I create an account. Usually it is a maximal length requirement that is not mentioned in the error message.

Don’t defend these idiotic practices.

troupo• 2 years ago

but want to use Mypassword69! for everything

That... That is literally what these "security practices" force you to use. You literally used an example of the ubiquitous "at least one uppercase letter, one special character, and one digit" requirement

gpvos3• 2 years ago

Hasn't been best practice for a decade.

This entire thread is about places that clearly have no clue about best practices.

I haven't come across this.

You sweet summer child...

racked2• 2 years ago

Microsoft SSO/auth flows have that feel in general. Really feels like something hacked together. Some examples from the top off my mind:

- In MS Authenticator, having to click on each subject rather than just showing the code immediately. If Google's Authenticator can show the code, why can't MS's?

- Azure DevOps randomly redirecting to the login form and back while already logged in.

- Azure DevOps randomly opening an authentication popup (presumably some SSO stuff) and closing it again

- Clunky-looking Office365 account management flows

Sylamore2• 2 years ago

MS Authenticator will show the codes for TOTP if you go to the hamburger menu and select "show codes".

vladvasiliu7• 2 years ago

I only very rarely use Azure DevOps, but that seems tame.

If you have multiple accounts open in the same browser session, regular Azure portal won't remember which one you chose when opening in a new tab. If you got to a new tab by clicking a link, it will send you to select which account you want, then helpfully send you to the portal homepage, forgetting the initial URL.

Well, that was before. Since a few days, they seem to have improved the experience, since they no longer ask which account I want to use, but helpfully pick the first on the list. No, they still don't remember which account was already being used when clicking the link. And no, switching accounts from the top-right icon doesn't keep you on your current page but sends you back to the portal homepage.

Then there are other webapps which seem to implement their own login flow: they figure your session is expired, but don't allow you to switch accounts. The only way to use a different account from this flow is to sign out of the current one, which, of course, signs you out from everywhere. The solution is going to a different site, say myaccount, login with the second one, go back to the first site which now allows you to choose.

Spooky233• 2 years ago

Authenticator is buggy. When they made it easy to report vulnerabilities back in 2016-17, a colleague and I were able to pretty trivially compromise the product about 5 times during a PoC - and we weren’t trying to do so!

The worst one involved hitting cancel 8 times in a certain window, which you let you in. Lol

hypeatei• 2 years ago

Yeah, DevOps is extremely bad with credential caching and refreshes. Sometimes after you elevate privileges, you'll see the privileged UI options and then they'll disappear on next page load.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

A few years ago Yahoo forced a password reset on old accounts. People had to remember the answer to secret questions from many years back, instead of the password they could enter correctly. And if they couldn’t guess the secret question, they were simply locked out of their email account. Utter insanity, but these types of quirks are everywhere still. Banks have strange password rules very often. And they may support only SMS 2FA. United Airlines still forces users to enter secret questions and answers. Medium has a bizarre “magic link” workflow. Etcetera.

thaumasiotes3• 2 years ago

What's especially terrible about this is that secret questions only weaken the security of your account, so someone doing the right thing will have provided a random answer unrelated to their life.

Years ago, I went through this process with Blizzard:

1. Blizzard started deactivating my World of Warcraft account on the grounds that I hadn't paid my subscription.

2. I would log in and pay for a subscription, reenabling the account.

3. (Steps 1-2 repeated several times. Blizzard never provided any explanation beyond the fact that, in their opinion, my payment was invalid, which it wasn't.)

4. After several rounds, Blizzard disabled the account completely, requiring me to contact customer support.

5. Customer support, for the first time, informed me that the reason my payment was viewed as invalid was that the preferred payment card on my account was set to a different card. The card I was actually using was also listed on my account, but it wasn't the preferred card, which made it invalid.

6. Since my account was disabled, I didn't have the option of paying with my preferred card. I had to answer my secret question.

7. Since I am not stupid, my secret question didn't have an answer. It was a long string of random characters which I didn't know. But customer service happily accepted my oral answer of "it's gibberish", defeating the purpose of the secret question.

So I guess the lesson here is that the correct way to answer a secret question is that you need to provide an answer which...

(1) Looks like a real answer when customer service looks at it, so that they have a better chance of rejecting someone who doesn't know the answer; but also

(2) Doesn't belong to the class of answers that would be easy for someone to guess, such as a car model when they ask you for the model of your first car.

These requirements are incompatible with each other. I don't know what secret questions are supposed to be doing. And I have to note that my assumption that there was no reason for anyone, including myself, to know the answer to my secret question would have been completely correct if Blizzard hadn't made the decision that using a payment card that was already registered to my Blizzard account was a sign of fraud.

surfingdino3• 2 years ago

Don't forget "business objectives" i.e. making it work, but be incompatible with other authenticators and claim that other authenticators are inferior. Classic Microsoft FUD combined with low quality of product.

ahoka• 2 years ago

“Mandatory password change intervals”

This is against all current commonly applied security recommendations (NIST, OWASP).

kayodelycaon• 2 years ago

And the rest of the world hasn’t gotten the memo. Rotating passwords was best practice for so long that every standard required it. Those haven’t been updated. Until it’s considered to be actively harmful and you fail audits for it, it won’t die. :(

sgbeal• 2 years ago

So many data breaches, information disclosures, they are in the news almost daily.

#YesterdayILearned the highly-appropriate phrase "breach fatigue."

mejthemage2• 2 years ago

Those rules sound more like they were developed by admins that don't know proper security and so they add complicated rules to feel like they are improving security.

The only password rule that needs to exist is "use something you've never used before". That really does make it difficult for most users though.

laserbeam• 2 years ago

My bank password is 5 digits + MFA. I am FORCED to have it 5 digits. I can’t use any other type of passwords with them.

8organicbits2• 2 years ago

That has some nice attributes though. Five digits should be quite easy to memorize, avoiding written down passwords. Most phone PINS are four digits, so you avoid phone PIN reuse. Realistically, the second factor is providing the bulk of the security. If that's a typical six digit TOTP, and they validate the PIN and TOTP together then an attacker has a one in one hundred billion chance of guessing correctly (10^5 + 10^6). Add in rate limiting by account and IP address, account locking, and other tools and that's extremely secure.

You COULD have a longer password, but the extra entropy is probably excessive. It probably increases the chance of password reuse problems, so pragmatically it may be worse.

I wouldn't recommend this approach in general, however.

DaSHacka• 2 years ago

USAA?

If not, do they also do the weird Symantic codes that're literally vanilla TOTP under the hood[0] but wants you to be locked in to a proprietary app instead?

[0] https://locima.com/2019/06/01/replacing-symantec-vip-with-a-...

buro9• 2 years ago

Yesterday I had a good example of this.

Website: "Please choose a complex password of at least 8 characters including special characters and numbers"

Me: Fires up the password manager, generates a 128 character random password, feels smug.

Website on next visit: "Please enter the characters in the 31, 98, 102 position from your password"

Me: WTAF

Context: Mortgage website in the UK

Edit: It's now dawned on me that they're storing this plain text so that they can do this... or at least encrypting rather than hashing, meaning that they can always decrypt the password.

thedanbob• 2 years ago

Maybe we need a corollary to "don't roll your own crypto": "don't roll your own password scheme".

Seanambers• 2 years ago

Ran into the same thing with Santander Bank in Poland. I have been online since the 90s never seen that password scheme ever anyplace else. It´s like who comes up with this insane shit.

deepsquirrelnet• 2 years ago

Until recently, treasurydirect made you login using your mouse by pressing a keyboard laid out on a screen. This is a government website in the US for buying treasury bonds.

I didn’t know this when I made my account and fired up keepass per usual to create a massive random password. It takes me nearly 5 minutes of carefully pressing buttons on the screen and trying to keep my location in the password (you can’t see what you entered) just to get in.

kevin_nisbet• 2 years ago

That's a good one. One of my personal favorites was a device that truncated long passwords in the set password function. Didn't take too long to figure out what happened but I was worried for a moment I wouldn't be able to unbrick that device.

xyst2• 2 years ago

“Please enter the characters in the 31, 98, 102 position…”

I think this is a “the password game” requirement.

MrJohz• 2 years ago

Edit: It's now dawned on me that they're storing this plain text so that they can do this... or at least encrypting rather than hashing, meaning that they can always decrypt the password.

It could well be that they're doing the encrypt/decrypt thing, but you can also get the same affect by pre-calculating the slices of password and hashing those slices.

For example, when you create the new user entry, you could take the password, pick three random characters from it, and store the indexes and the hash together in a table row (in your case, something like ("31,98,102","salt$hashfgtd")).

You do that two or three times, and then, every time you ask the user to log in, you randomly choose one of these entries, ask the user to enter the character positions, and check the hash of the result against the hash in the row.

The Student Finance England website used to have a similar setup about asking for letters X, Y, and Z, but it rotated between only a handful of combinations, so I think it probably used something like this.

That said, a few years ago gov.uk took over the SFE login form and modernised it, including replacing the XYZ system with a version where you just enter the whole string, so presumably either they also had hashed the whole string, or they were storing it in a format that was retrievable. Or I guess they still only store the XYZ tuples but do the indexing and comparison logic internally.

high_na_euv2• 2 years ago

It's now dawned on me that they're storing this plain text so that they can do this...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing

tengwar2• 2 years ago

Sometimes passwords are stored in plain text to improve security. An example is K in mobile telephony, a number shared between the home network and the USIM. This is used for mutual authentication and establishing a cryptographic session key. There is no concept of a certification authority (which can be subverted) or a signature - there is just a shared secret, stored in plain text, so there are minimal trust requirements. But stored in a secure piece of hardware with write-only access for K. You pass a challenge in, and get back a number which can be used to prove identity, and a number which can be used to establish a crypto context (here I am simplifying by not describing the mutual authentication).

Ok, so in the context of your mortgage website, they may be doing the same thing. The motivation may be to stop keyloggers or anyone who is "inside" HTTPS getting the password. The implementation may be a hardware security module which is write-only for the password and which gives a yes/no answer when asked to check a character.

8gt786gv87g• 2 years ago

engineers typically do not understand people very well as a baseline. i think engineering attracts the type of people who struggle with social behavior. you can't make it work unless you filter those engineers out and companies do not hire engineers to understand the customer anyways.

companies hire data science to ascertain human behavior, but this is not understanding the customer. if you want to improve your products and actually understand the customer then start giving your customer service or customer experience departments a financial boost instead of treating them like the bottom feeders of the entire company.

I often wonder how they get away with it all.

unregulated industry + no union. tech workers practically beg to be exploited.

indymike• 2 years ago

Complexity is the enemy of both security and usability. I had a day last week where I had to authenticate 28 times to different services due to forced re-auths. No security benefit. None. It cost me 2-3 hours of my life. The IT team needs to realize their security is costing our company 4102avg_hourly_pay*26 for this. That’s a lot of money for zero benefit.

mirekrusin• 2 years ago

Something tells me those kind of mistakes are not done "by engineers" / "by developers" – who rarely have any saying at all and if they do they are ignored more often than not – more likely that's incompetent pseudo-architects and/or product owners/managers.

bgro• 2 years ago

I’ve been reporting major problems nonstop for the past like 20 years. It usually takes me less than 5 minutes when I first learn of some new security feature to find a problem with it. Most of that 5 minutes is physically writing my email to security highlighting major oversights. I don’t know how these people get jobs and gatekeep me out of both hiring or my scientifically accurate and backed feedback for not passing the buzzfeed security quizzes for certifications. I’m otherwise a full stack software engineer.

Even my simple requests like not auto flagging emails from confirmed and fully validated Microsoft services gets denied because it’s “too hard” so everything except internal users and random whitelisted services like github and azure AWS is instead flagged as suspicious, causing alertness fatigue.

I’ve reported major logic problems to many major companies and usually the only response I get is an indirect followup email through HR or some other non technical people sent to the entire distribution list as a followup saying how it’s technically better than what was there before (it’s scientifically and mathematically not) and that we just need to do it.

I never get recognized or win bug bounties because there’s always some loophole where I didn’t actually help them and they just magically fixed the long standing issue by coincidence after I reported it.

Most recently, I discovered a “feature” with Microsoft OAuth that has a severe flaw and could essentially shut down all MS OAuth functionality, and all consequences branching from that. Still no response.

I’m not even trying to find these. They just keep getting in my way of trying to do work.

For example, I have to authenticate up to FIVE times per authentication, per authentication —- Auth syncing can be slow leading to multiple auth requests that would otherwise only need a single one to propegate.

5 authentications * 5 programs needing individual (slow-sync) auth = 25 authentications I have to already pass to be able to start standup or pass in order to un-hard-freeze my live demo to potentially hundreds of engineers.

Imagine driving your car, and the steering wheel locks when it loses internet connection (like in a tunnel or just randomly) or because the re-auth period has passed. Security devs don’t want to full stop the car because they’ll get yelled at, so just lock steering so they can’t steer home.

Well now if you’re on a highway, that’s pretty stressful and dangerous. But it’s like they are just salting the wound by adding a series of glitchy minigames where you have to first read all the spammy popup dialogs, and then solve a Baldi’s Basics math puzzle, and then rotate a ball to not be upside down (?) and then manually match a missile launch code.

danparsonson• 2 years ago

My favourite recent example was an app that made me create an account, and allowed me to provide a 24 character password, which then sent me a validation email requiring a login on their website, where a 20 character password limit was in force.

jollofricepeas• 2 years ago

I actually blame the auditors.

In the case of password construction and complexity, we’ve learned that rotation and complexity leads to worse password practices.

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

However many large companies do not adhere to the latest NIST guidance (which is many years old by now).

This is why password complexity and rotation is still so nuts.

worble• 2 years ago

This boggles my brain on so many levels - are you telling me Microsoft Authenticator only stores the entry based on label? It doesn't generate an internal key or anything? And then they claim that the issue is websites not putting the issuer in the label, but in the issuer field, where it belongs?

Is no-one at Microsoft actually using their own Authenticator? Unless I'm missing something, this would make it nearly unusable for almost all applications - as soon as you've used your email for one site you wouldn't be able to add it for any others?

SoftTalker5• 2 years ago

From the article: "Microsoft hasn’t bothered to fix it because Microsoft Authenticator is a free product and therefore doesn’t generate revenue."

lostlogin4• 2 years ago

It’s actually worse than that. Given the opportunity to escape, I’m sure many would pay to to allowed to do so.

Entering multi factor hell just to get into Teams is something I’d happily pay to avoid.

mihaaly5• 2 years ago

Hermione Granger would say: What an idiot!

Only almost all and increasing number of their revenue producing product depends on this being reliable, or at least have no bad reputation being unreliable. As the reputation is what many corporate ballonheads only care about. Still, hurt that too in their incompetent bencounter singlemindedness.

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

Is no-one at Microsoft actually using their own Authenticator?

At most, I'd expect people to only use it for work, where Microsoft is the only issuer.

I also expect lots and lots of people to not use it.

tzs• 2 years ago

Unless I'm missing something, this would make it nearly unusable for almost all applications - as soon as you've used your email for one site you wouldn't be able to add it for any others?

Yeah, something is not making sense here. I've got multiple accounts with the same email and just compared the codes from Authenticator, which is my backup TOTP app, with the correct codes and Authenticator agreed.

I did find a UI problem that could lead to a user getting the wrong code. When the first few accounts are on the screen and it is time to refresh the codes the ones on screen refresh every 30 seconds.

The ones offscreen do not. When I scroll to bring offscreen codes into view they show an older code. In one case the code that scrolled in was 4 codes behind the correct code.

Mathnerd3142• 2 years ago

I've scanned two Facebook codes in sequence, the second Facebook code overwrote the first. Maybe that is the issue.

alienchow2• 2 years ago

Along the same grain, Google, the search powerhouse, releases Google Authenticator with no search bar in the Android version. And continues to wilfully not include one despite multiple feature requests.

Yet there's a search bar in the iOS version. Just why?

I'm willing to bet that in that gigantic Piper repo, there's already a local search library that they could just drop in in a single CL. But that's not LLM.

whartung• 2 years ago

When I bought a new phone and moved all my stuff over from a backup of my original phone, apparently the Google Authenticator doesn’t back something up.

When I launched GA all of my 2FA data was gone.

Thankfully I had my backup codes. And I could also still use the old one on the old phone. But the nightmare potential is quite high.

martinsnow• 2 years ago

Googlers don't use Android

mihaaly5• 2 years ago

They likely use for one account only, their MS account at work, where it is forced, but not elsewhere because they know it suck.

magicalhippo2• 2 years ago

I've been using Microsoft's one for my work accounts because, well, we're elbow deep into Office365 so why not.

I've never gotten that dialog, and have not had any issues with the accounts I've added. Since they're my work accounts, 99% of them share my work email as account name.

So does that mean I've just been lucky, in that the sites I've signed with have provided a sufficiently unique label? I feel I didn't fully get what the issue is.

muststopmyths• 2 years ago

Same. 3 personal accounts use the same email address. Two of them are FAANG and it all seems to fine (for going on a decade)

prng2021• 2 years ago

Seems like the bug is specific to the iOS app when scanning QR codes.

magicalhippo2• 2 years ago

Ah, using Android so I guess that's why. Weird though, given that Microsoft claims it's an intentional feature. Why wouldn't a feature like that be implemented in both platforms?

Even though it might be a dumb feature as seen from the users POV, it seems sufficiently special that it's something that I would assume one would want to have feature parity on.

trustinmenowpls• 2 years ago

That's me (iOS scan the QR code) and I've never encountered the bug either.

mihaaly5• 2 years ago

I wanted to use a hardware key as 2FA but naturelly not all systems support it or not well enough (maximum of 1 key to register, are you f serious!!?), then had to choose something beacuse tick tock, this is not something that brings in bread to the family just a f nuisance to dig myself into what is out there and how good they are, just to be able to log in, what the hell, MS was mandated in a previous place, lets go for it, I wasted too much time already by trying to use my online accounts, not using it for meaningful work while playing with this sh around.

The whole online identification is seriously unreliable and full of big wholes, and much bigger risks, yet we build our whole life on top of it. Still using passwords after decades (Yes. Decades!) of serious harm caused by insecurities with it, and trying to patch with plasters or just some paint?! We are so damn stupid, almost no week goes by without some online system gives away serious bits or complete set of personal details of the masses easy to abuse and we just sit in the middle of the burning room like the coffee sipping doggy with that stupid hat and smile in the meme 'this is fine, this is fine'. Lets choose some longer than 8 character password, different for all system just to be safe, we are going to be fine, we are going to be fine.

Denkel• 2 years ago

If you read Microsoft's response, they point at the companies issuing the MFA because -according to MSFT- "the companies are not entering the issuer in the label" and MSFT expect the issuer to be there.

I would imagine that, if that is their expectation, they would include the issuer in the label themselves, so, none of its products should have any issue.

The problem comes from using other provides -that use the "issuer" field to store the issuer (how quirky of them, amirite?)- while having the same email as identifier.

breadwinner• 2 years ago

This happened to me when I updated MS Authenticator after not updating it for a while. It wiped out all data, and I got locked out of all accounts. MS Authenticator is not a carefully written product.

napsterbr• 2 years ago

Something similar happened to me about a year ago when the Google Authenticator app automatically updated to a new version. I lost all my accounts in the update process. Definitely learned a few lessons there.

xandrius2• 2 years ago

This nightmare is why I always backup MFA QR codes and use those to add them to an open source app which let's me backup the data elsewhere too.

Sorry to hear that!

SoftTalker5• 2 years ago

Yep, any time I use an authenticator with an account I generate "backup codes" and keep them in my password manager. This saved me when I got a new phone and for some reason my Google Authenticator did not transfer to the new phone properly.

alchemist1e92• 2 years ago

I’d be interested to hear details on that. I’ve been thinking of printing QR codes as backups.

qingcharles3• 2 years ago

I put my TOTPs in Google and Microsoft authenticators for double-redundancy. On two separate handsets. Then I have someone else I trust implicitly scan the QRs too and have them on their phone.

I've been burned too many times.

issafram• 2 years ago

ymmv, but I've never had this issue.

chaz6• 2 years ago

When asked to set up TOTP, the first thing I do is scan the QR code with a QR code reader, and save the secret into my password manager, before adding it to my authenticator app.

gleenn• 2 years ago

Does this actually work? I thought most TOTP codes were single use. Have you actually tried re-using them?

Rychard• 2 years ago

The initial QR code isn't a TOTP code, it contains the secret used to generate the TOTP codes.

userbinator2• 2 years ago

The QR code contains the TOTP key, which is the seed that's used to generate the codes, which form a time-based pseudorandom sequence.

smitelli2• 2 years ago

You can absolutely scan the QR code with multiple authenticator apps (or copy paste the seed value into them) and they will all produce the same codes in the same order going forward.

sleepycatgirl• 2 years ago

Oh, that's actually really nice, I should start doing the same thing myself

esafak• 2 years ago

1password lets you see it after you've saved it too.

n8henrie• 2 years ago

As does Bitwarden (just "edit" and it is revealed)

Nextgrid• 2 years ago

However, this does reduce the separation of factors, if that password manager is the same one containing your actual password.

Depending on your threat model this may be an issue.

NotACracker2• 2 years ago

I've just made a test: multiple accounts using the same account/email and there is no conflict.

I even have a matching icon of the issuer for each entry; the issuer is registered for each entry.

I am using the MS Authenticator for years and I've never had any problem of that sort, and of course, I am always using the same email as my account/username.

Anyway, I'm just putting the result of my test. It's not like this going to change your mind about the authenticator or Microsoft itself here...

3np• 2 years ago

Which platform? Supposedly the issue ("feature") is specific to the iOS version?

NotACracker2• 2 years ago

Android

CatWChainsaw2• 2 years ago

A whole different type of "too big to fail", and a great demonstration of why putting the keys to your kingdom in Microsoft's/Google's/Apple's hands is a stupid idea.

halfcat• 2 years ago

Is AWS any better, or what’s the solution? Most businesses aren’t technical and don’t need to be in the authentication/security business.

CatWChainsaw2• 2 years ago

Greetings fellow feline, I am a microbiologist not IT. In that capacity, the only general suggestion is to have redundant authentication measures that cannot all be crippled by one source like this. I can't imagine it's popular, or easy, for a company to want to be able to use multiple authentication schemes, but this sort of situation shows why lock-in is a bad idea.

ReptileMan• 2 years ago

And keepass keeps complete history since the file was created. Someone was really sloppy in Microsoft in the design phase.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

some security products seem like they are designed to discredit security as a field. imo the market is just at the point of backlash against the decadent stupidity in that cost centre. if you are going to humiliate people by making them jump through hoops 10x a day with context switching 2FA tokens and make serious people with educations and responsibilities use words like "smishing," you better be sure that hoop is the finest example of engineering anywhere. the solution has become the problem. I'm calling the peak.

jokethrowaway• 2 years ago

Are we again in a Microsoft 2000 phase? It seems like everything Microsoft is broken these days.

GitHub barely works after the acquisition. Azure is a joke. Teams is the bane of my existance. Outlook is the second one.

Do they need to ask harder leetcoding problems during the interviews?

FridgeSeal• 2 years ago

Are they actually capable of releasing anything good?

I guess C# isn’t horrible? It’s far from a language I want to use, but it’s not teams level of atrocious, so they’ve got that going for them I guess.

VSCode is pretty good, but not good enough to stop me migrating off the second a more viable editor arrived.

Word and office have degraded into a “doesn’t aggressively fail” sort of scenario, so they’re not “good” they’re just incumbent.

elmo2you• 2 years ago

VSCode is pretty good, but not good enough to stop me migrating off the second a more viable editor arrived.

If you're interested, there is VSCodium (VCCode without the Microsoft/proprietary parts). There's also Theia, if you want to take things a step further away from Microsoft.

I guess C# isn’t horrible? It’s far from a language I want to use, but it’s not teams level of atrocious, so they’ve got that going for them I guess.

No clue if this is true for other companies, but I know a company that does big outsourcing project and most of them in C#/.NET and Angular. I've seen plenty of that code. My impression was/is that most of the C# code was extremely basic and mostly just tying together all ready-made libraries/features/frameworks/services (which Microsoft provides on their platforms/products) that actually made up the apps/services. C# itself just isn't all that much. Apart from maybe a gateway to guaranteed vendor lock-in. Maybe that is why they made sure to not mess that one up ;)

resource_waste• 2 years ago

Microsoft is a legacy company and soon to be zombie company.

I think you'd be out of your mind to start a new company and use Microsoft for anything except Excel.

The only reason my company seems to use it, we have software from the 2000s that only runs on Windows. Maybe there is some backdoor bribery going on, because someone decided sharepoint was a good idea.

coding123• 2 years ago

Has anyone else noticed it's not possible to have an account that you can log in anymore? Locked out by AI, locked out by suspicious activity, locked out due to lost phone, lost authy, broken everything. You drive an RV? locked out due to location change. You have a common name? Locked out. Have a foreign name? Locked out.

concernedctzn• 2 years ago

using microsoft authenticator I just ran into this recently and searched to find it's a known issue that microsoft has no announced plan of fixing. Strange to see it pop up here separately, I guess it's becoming more common. I knew to cancel the dialogue and manually add the account without the QR code to workaround it but I'm sure plenty of people will have their accounts locked because of this

datavirtue• 2 years ago

I need a good authenticator app, I guess. I'm using Microsoft's and have a lot of different stuff in there. I may have run into this already but don't know it.

pndy• 2 years ago

Try 2FAS - it works without cloud, can import from few other apps (sadly not from Microsoft one) and can export from and import to a file. Works on Android and iOS

https://2fas.com/

todotask3• 2 years ago

One of this reason, I can think of having Passkey can be a better advantage over relying on centralised account management?

NikhilVerma• 2 years ago

A similar thing has happened with Twitter. After the Musk takeover and the removal of SMS for auth something has changed they keys of the 2FA authenticator. My old keys don't work and my "ticket" has been waiting on Twitter support (which were probably all fired) for resolution.

justinclift• 2 years ago

"Microsoft is the Boeing of software."

Seems like an apt description. :)

t00• 2 years ago

Even for Microsoft accounts, use an alternative app for 2FA/MFA. Recently I switched to the open source Aegis, which allows encrypted backups and does not have the issue described.

iggldiggl• 2 years ago

Doesn't help for those cases where an organisation is enforcing Authenticator usage, though.

dddw• 2 years ago

Aegis is the best

kaffeeringe• 2 years ago

It also tracks your position all the time. That is the bigger problem to me. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/de/reports/com.azure.a...

vladvasiliu7• 2 years ago

Interesting, on iOS it didn't even ask to use the location.

Do they do it because they can? Haven't used Android in a long time, but I had the impression that they also introduced finer-grained permissions, as opposed to blanket approve / deny everything the app asks for.

rmholt• 2 years ago

Android definitely has fine grained permissions. In fact my phone asks me each time a new app wants to use my location. Interestingly enough, I don't recall seeing a location prompt for Google's services

Mathnerd3142• 2 years ago

This report lists trackers signatures found by static analysis in this APK. This is not a proof of activity of these trackers.

KMag2• 2 years ago

I lost a few GMail accounts because I changed countries and computers since I created them. I tried logging in, Google said my password was correct, but both the device and the IP were unfamiliar. I don't recall exactly what was wrong with using the recovery address to recover from the problem, but that didn't work, despite my still having access to my recovery email address. I think I might need to be able to tell Google what my recovery email address is, and I may have used one of those randomized + suffixes to my recovery address.

I used to use Google Authenticator with my GMail accounts, but disabled that out of fears it's just one more thing to go wrong, with Google providing little recourse.

My password is a bit over 96 bits of entropy, generated by extracting 256 bits from /dev/urandom as a multi-precision integer, divmod'ing to extract one instance from each of the character classes (digit, lower, uppper, symbol) and then the rest from the combined alphabet (digit + lower + upper + symbol), and finally the leftover entropy used for Fisher-Yates shuffle of the password so the first digit isn't always a digit, etc. Passwords are per-site, stored using a gpg-based password manager I wrote in the early 2000s.

MFA would still help for some types of ongoing active compromise, but not for dumps of password hashes from a DB compromise. It really kills me that recovery from my recovery email address doesn't work, even though I know my password.

Honestly, if you haven't logged in from anywhere in a few months and you have the correct password, they should at least just send some verification link/code to your recovery address without requiring you to tell them your recovery address. Sure, maybe don't say where you're sending the recovery link, but turning the recovery address into another password you need to memorize without ever telling you it's some weird combination of recovery email address and recovery password is just highly annoying.

aflag2• 2 years ago

And the fact that there's no one to talk to means that if computer says no, that's it.

alchemist1e92• 2 years ago

There is absolutely nobody. It’s crazy. Realizing how dependent I am on gmail has been scary.

I’ve started a project to attempt to move to my own domain and self hosting full email stack. It’s a huge amount of work. However the power Google has over me, should my gmail account be hijacked or turned off is incredible.

Starting from the bottom is the security of the domain registrar and DNS records. It looks like there are some good options, though obviously with additional price. Basically you have to use the corporate services with additional security features.

The self-hosting email and server security is something I have the background to handle.

8organicbits2• 2 years ago

I recently tried Google support for an issue with an out of support Pixel I was messing with. I assumed I'd get a "sorry that device isn't supported" response, but they gas-lit me, claimed that they could help, and proceeded to send me completely unrelated links until I gave up. Links unrelated to the Pixel and the problem I was facing.

I think I was talking to a bot and they made it appear human by slowing everything down so the whole exchange took 30 minutes, but maybe it was just a human following a script. Either way, it was worse than if they didn't have support since they just wasted my time.

notRobot• 2 years ago

You would have received a notice to your recovery email when you added it to the account in question and you might be able to find that email in your inbox and figure out the randomised suffix in the "to" field.

mihaaly5• 2 years ago

Damn! I did not know that.

I set recovery address to an other (dormant) gmail account, just to aggravate the risk put upon me! :D (I do not trust google now with more data than I already given and must give, see later)

I need to speed up the migration of my email life to the paid account I initiated and testing (protonmail) because some serious problem could emerge otherwise (there is an international move on the horizon). I started to give gmail to various governmental (taxation, healthcare, authorities) organizations when it was innocent, as contact of the account used for light things at the time, when everyone started to discover how to manage bureaucracy online. Which succeeded and my gmail became an important tool managing matters throughout some international moves. Some accounts here and there are dormant but still with important matters that I might need once (how is it with that many years valid Australian travel authorisation or what that I did not need last year?...). Still gmail was innocent enough, despite the mass surveillance sped up, which was a bit inconvenient feeling but rarely got any real secrets or deeply persoanl matters apart from the fact I have dealings with that organization here and there. But now, as online administration is borderline mandatory being other means left to the bare minimum (when I am sent online in an office for something, that's a turning point in mind) or in other country. Gmail is very inconveniently in the center with all the worrysome things their automated bots carry out against unsuspecting user without mercy and appeal, that the migration process had to be started. Hence test with protonmail. But it so damn widespread now, I have not enough time going through all, some forgotten and need to dig into faint memories, it is torture. But has to be done. Has to be done.

Our twin girls should not be put up with the mercy of google bots when they get into the age of requiring email for official matters.

kevincox2• 2 years ago

I have something similar. I was added to the Google domain of some open source project, given an email address. But I can't log in because Google is demanding a phone number.

I guess I could probably talk to the admin and get it reset, but it's pretty upsetting that the are basically holding accounts hostage until you hand over personal information.

franga20002• 2 years ago

leaving IT experts wondering, ‘Why would you pick Microsoft?’

Well I can tell you why people pick MS Authenticator - it's because microsoft basically forces it on you, uses dark patterns to avoid letting you use any other standard OTP app and doesn't give admins the tools to disable it.

As an admin, I can disable every single MFA method individually, including TOTP, but Microsoft Authenticator is force-enabled. When users go to enable TOTP (or are forced to), the option is called "Microsoft Authenticator", not something more generic. The QR code they get is not a standard TOTP one, so any other client will reject it. There's a small link below it letting you "use another app" which finally gives you a real TOTP QR code. This is INSANE!

kaveet• 2 years ago

Microsoft admin isn’t my day job, but I dealt with this exact thing the other day—the toggles for Microsoft Defender MFA are spread across Entra ID policies, Registration Campaigns, per-user settings, and more Microsoft subdomains I’d never heard of. After two hours the best I could do was add a Skip button to the MFA prompt when our users sign in.

surfingdino3• 2 years ago

That's how they play

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

ncr100• 2 years ago

Lawsuit? Were these folks defrauded out of money due to the extra costs incurred?

Spooky233• 2 years ago

In enterprise, subscription utilization is what pays the sales team. They are eventually get canned if you don’t use the suite.

They’ll send some goons to let the CEO/CFO know you are a spendthrift.

devjab2• 2 years ago

I use the MS app for work, as it’s required as you say. I’m not sure our first-line support really minds though, as if people weren’t using this then they would be supporting a range of apps. It’s obviously unfortunate that it sort of sucks for them that they have to reset these things for people all the time, but I guess it’s the lesser of multiple evils.

That being said, maybe we should advise employees that they shouldn’t use it for personal things even though they have it as it sucks.

devjab2• 2 years ago

That being said, maybe we should advise employees that they shouldn’t use it for personal things even though they have it as it sucks.

reaperducer• 2 years ago

if people weren’t using this then they would be supporting a range of apps.

Or one single better non-Microsoft app.

But making people fear that using something else is complicated or expensive is how Microsoft makes money.

If you can't compete, confuse.

xorcist• 2 years ago

Is this not how pretty much all IT megacorps operate?

Microsoft has historically pursued these aggressive embrace-and-extend tactics very successfully.

tjoff• 2 years ago

And you have to do the "use another app" dance on every single login too... You know I have TOTP setup, you know I'm not using MS Authenticator.

To make matters worse(?), I have not been able to login to Teams at all in the last two weeks. I select "use another app" ... and nothing happens. Sigh.

It is astonishing how bad we can make software today. We used to at least try.

creshal• 2 years ago

Works On My Machine (tm), your org's admin team probably missed a hidden checkbox that gets moved around between admin pages every odd hour (except on days divisible by 4, where it's missing entirely) (except during chinese new year) (except when that overlaps with a leap year) (except when an odd-numbered amount of users has the wrong license), but you can probably also do it powershell (except it's undocumented) (and deprecated)

...yeah, I don't know either why peopler dislike modern Microsoft.

sschueller• 2 years ago

We noticed this crap when we rolled out MS365. We immediately told all users to not use the MS authenticator.

The fact that Microsofts still hasn't fixed this should put in question their priorities in security and safety of all other products as well. This is just unacceptable.

nottorp• 2 years ago

Yes, when you add one more device between you and your data you are now dependent on it functioning correctly.

Today it's a MS fuckup, but any such system could malfunction.

EGreg• 2 years ago

I have been recommending for years that people have a DIFFERENT email alias for evey service

Email aliases look like yourname+somealias@gmail.com

This also helps avoid social engineering attacks when people call into your provider:

https://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking...

mihaaly5• 2 years ago

"it was the fault of users or companies that use the app for authentication" MS said.

Spot on right. They should have been more prudent in selecting services. Absolutely right, users' and clients' fault it is!

You see a smug bastard company that hurts the client they live on because they provide faulty service, they hurt repeatedly, in thick queue throughout time, for long time, fault after fault after fault and just release the smear the responsibility elsewhere department on the clients complaining, whatever the official title of this department is, PR or whatever, while the issues are reported in news everywhere, publicised, then who would you blame? The company, or the clients still choosing the company against common sense and own experience?

The case touches me because I am approaching a job where I would not use Windows anymore, I am tired of the Windows ecosystem. It only makes life differently complicated, or many times more complicated, more difficult to do my job than without it. I have not enough time listing how many things they made much worse in the past decade or more that my every day is a swimm through the flow of piss MS releases day after day at all of us. They were better in some short period long ago, only partially still, after some very bad historic period, now they are determined that with hard work they will f up all what is left.

I have a friend working on the MS Teams. He is very busy, working hard, they will release some sort of AR meet feature, packed with complex and revolutionary (i.e. experimental) approaches so you could enjoy solutions that probably will work ok and not annoy you with visual artefacts and problems not eliminated before release, with the headset you require for it, probably will not be forced on you but likely annoy the hell out of you by the pop up promotions when you try to do your urgent job after a critical update. Who the f needs that? While the Teams is a mess to work with already with lots of noise and half cooked bloated whatevers already being a distaction, not helpful, not at all. Probably only the call quality is the only good in it by now, but that was purchased from elsewhere, that was given to them. They are so good making things too complicated and being unable making it well because it is too complicated to do well, too expensive, so let's just release a half cooked one and leave it there for decades (like the dialogs in Windows) and put the blame on elsewhere by the put the blame on elsewhere department put together precisely for this.

briffid• 2 years ago

I have many accounts with the same user names, and they don't get overwritten. There might be some design flaw somewhere, but it's surely not what the article states, ie. that you cannot have the same username on different sites.

mattmaroon2• 2 years ago

Same. I mean I don’t doubt some bug exists, but I use it on iOS, almost always with QR codes and the same email address with no issues. I quite like the product. I switched from Google and it’s been much better.

I am sure whatever is going on, it’s a bug and not a feature.

todotask3• 2 years ago

When I tried to sign up for Hotmail account, the challenging step I have to solve isn't friendly for my impaired eyesight.

tropicalfruit• 2 years ago

this is really a serious problem.

some of those captchas are bordering on hostile.

a lot of things are designed with total disregard for access

try to zoom your phone and half the buttons your apps will disappear

enable "zoomed" on iPadOS and you can longer scroll to the bottom of long settings menus.

so many things

todotask3• 2 years ago

I gave up when the rounds to solve increased to 20, iirc.

arianvanp• 2 years ago

Safari had a similar bug where it would just overwrite your passkey with no warning whatsoever -- completely locking you out of your account. It has since then be fixed but this caused me to lose access to my GitHub

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=270553

Safari still has some bugs where it can't discern between websites hosted on different Subdomains except for hardcoded exceptions and it will override password of one subdomain with the other. Happens to me on a monthly basis.

bobbylarrybobby2• 2 years ago

Keychain’s warnings that I was reusing passwords across StackOverflow and the StackExchange subdomains are part of what drove me to use a third party password manager that can manually add multiple sites to an entry, but I didn't realize this stupidity went even deeper.

__jonas2• 2 years ago

Odd, I just received this email from MS that looks a lot like phishing but seems not to be?

Action required: Enable multifactor authentication for your tenant by 15 October 2024
You’re receiving this email because you’re a global administrator for [Literally a UUID here, no organization name or anything] Starting 15 October 2024, we will require users to use multifactor authentication (MFA) to sign into the Azure portal, Microsoft Entra admin center, and Intune admin center. To ensure your users maintain access, you’ll need to enable MFA by 15 October 2024.
If you can’t enable MFA for your users by that date, you’ll need to apply to postpone the enforcement date. If you don’t, your users will be required to set up MFA.
Action required
To identify which users are signing into Azure with and without MFA, refer to our documentation. To ensure your users can access the Azure portal, Microsoft Entra admin center, and Intune admin center, enable MFA for your users by 15 October 2024. If you can’t enable MFA by 15 October 2024, apply to postpone the enforcement date.

The thing is, I'm not administrating any organization with Microsoft.

I have a private office365 family account or whatever it's called, and I have 2FA set up for my account, I have no idea what they are on about, especially because the email doesn't contain even my name or the name of the supposed organization, just some ID.

It's definitely an Email from Microsoft though.

cheschire• 2 years ago

__jonas2• 2 years ago

Spot on! It was in fact some Azure account I made years ago, in hindsight, it did say to log into the azure portal right in the email. The random UUID instead of salutation threw me off a bit.

xattt• 2 years ago

I don’t see what the issue is. People could plan ahead and just write the six digit code in a notebook as a backup.

causality0• 2 years ago

Well damn. I've used Microsoft Authenticator for years and just happened to have never used the QR code feature. Is there an easy way to migrate all the data into Google Authenticator?

ta988• 2 years ago

This is not a software engineer issue, it is a product manager issue, whom relentlessly ignored users' complaints.

Obscurity4340• 2 years ago

KeePass, peeps

markuta• 2 years ago

What's also annoying is that some MFA providers like Microsoft Authenticator and Authy lock you into their platforms, no export or offline backups features, at least without a rooted phone.

websap• 2 years ago

wait a second, what? If I use the same email for another account, I could get randomly locked out from some other account.

I just checked my app., there are 2 different emails for 2 entries, other entries are provider specific.

Is there a good way to migrate from MS Authenticator and what options do I have?

One of the entries without the Issuer correctly set is Outlook.com itself. WTF!

addicted• 2 years ago

How has MS not fixed this. It seems like the kind of bug that shouldn’t ever happen in the first place (it’s such an obvious flaw) but now that they are aware, it should be priority #1 to fix.

parody577• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40523411

rpdillon• 2 years ago

One of the things I really like about the file system is that it's a sort of universal API: if you can get the files a program has written, then you can do all sorts of stuff, like version control them, back them up (and restore them!), sync them across machines, and develop interoperable tools. This is particularly useful with an application that provides TOTP codes.

But modern mobile apps have an architecture that makes reading directly from the filesystem the exception, rather than the rule, which leads to apps directly managing all their data in their own database, rather than in a shared filesystem. This removes a lot of user agency, and opens the door to tough-to-remediate bugs, like a new version of the app corrupting or erasing old data.

Microsoft Authenticator will overwrite an account with the same username. Given the prominent use of email addresses for usernames, most users’ apps share the same username. Google Authenticator and just about every other authenticator app add the name of the issuer — such as a bank or a car company — to avoid this issue. Microsoft only uses the username.

I feel like mobile took a step backward when it made the filesystem a second-class citizen, despite some of the security improvements mobile brought with app sandboxing. Restoring from a backup would have fully remediated this issue, at least once folks understood what was causing it.

Flaw has Microsoft Authenticator overwriting MFA accounts, locking users out

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