Magic/tragic email links: don't make them the only option

https://recyclebin.zip/posts/annoyinglinks/

by gepeto42 • 2 years ago

706 504 2 years ago

billy99k• 2 years ago

I've never liked magic links. I've found multiple sites that will just clobber the existing login session when you access the magic link, meaning someone could trick you into logging into another account.

Pxtl• 2 years ago

I like magic links (as long as they self-renew the cookie so I never have to log in again) but you do highlight the critical need for a good landing page if you use them, like "are you sure you want to log in as SomeUserNameGuy? You're currently logged in as SomeOtherUserNameGuy."

imzadi• 2 years ago

Firewall blocks that link

ceejayoz• 2 years ago

Probably the entire .zip TLD.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

Yeah. To be honest, I kind of setup this blog as a joke when the dot zip gTLD came up, as an inside joke with a few fellow security people who (rightfully) are against the ever expanding list of TLDs we have to deal with.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

Because I'm an idiot who likes hosting stuff on bad gTLDs, here's the markdown content of the actual post for you and everyone behind some corporate firewall that blocks dot zip:

The term "Magic Links" once meant a [futuristic PDA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Link). Nowdays, companies like [Auth0](https://auth0.com/docs/authenticate/passwordless/authenticat...) use it to refer to the slightly-magical feat of including a login link in an email.

Last week, the great website you should subscribe to if you haven't already (it's great, when you're not logged out), [404 Media](https://www.404media.co/), posted ["We Don't Want Your Password"](https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/) in defense of so-called magic links.

Of course, as stated in the article, such email links are harder to phish than passwords, can't lead to a breach of passwords, and protect the site itself against users who might reuse passwords previously compromised.

The article even covers some of my annoyances with this system, but throws out this sentence:

[We find this to be a much easier login process and wish it was more common across the web where appropriate.](https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/)

Easier than what? Easier than a long password, without a password manager? Easier than a passkey? Easier than an OTP sent to the same email address?

This sentence reads to me as one written by someone mostly working and _living_ from a single laptop and mobile device. The second part of the sentence, calling for more sites to do this is why I am writing this.

For any scenario with a minimal amount of complexity, like users with multiple computers, and you're looking at a scenario where the site's unwillingness to deal with other login methods shoves friction on the end-user.

### What makes them tragic:

1. Multiple devices. Who doesn't use at least a few computers weekly? I don't have my email on my gaming PC, nor do I have it on my work laptops. 1. Slower. From 2 seconds slower to minutes slower, depending on SMTP delays as well as how awkward it is to get the link to the right browser. 1. Anti-mobile. As mentioned by 404 in their own article, this breaks the ability to use in-app browsers, which is quite annoying especially for RSS reader type apps. It makes interacting with any local link in the RSS feed extremely annoying. 1. Indirect security downsides. Pushing people to access personal email on work devices (or vice-versa) isn't exactly a win for security.

Another annoying _passwordless_ system is to email or SMS an OTP the end user can type in.

While this sucks, it at least allows you to easily log in in situations where you don't have a clear and easy copy/paste path from the email client to the browser you want to log in to.

[Stratechery](https://stratechery.com/), powered by [Passport](https://passport.online), uses this type of scheme (click link OR type in OTP), which is still shifting annoyances onto end-users to free developers from implementing passkeys, but at least has a bit more of an appreciation for end-users.

If you insist on using magic/tragic links by default, at least consider offering a robust alternative, such as [passkeys](https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/), especially if your audience is technical and privacy-focused.

dbliss• 2 years ago

You are a national treasure.

Jerrrry2• 2 years ago

URL encoding solves part of this.

  >Example.com/Verify/5W9GF

If it fails, prompt for OTP on the fallback /Verify/ or /code/ page.

Local convenience cookie for authenticating device and permi-cookie for requesting device.

Permanent cookies should be accompanied with a 4 digit numeric PIN between any critical functions unless the session is new.

jameshart7• 2 years ago

Best implementation I see of this requires you to click the link on whatever device you receive the email on, but it doesn’t transfer the session there - it just triggers completion of the login process on whatever device you initiated the process on.

megous• 2 years ago

A phisher's dream.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

Yeah exactly. Plus, sometimes SOMETHING will click the link before it even gets to the person's inbox (some enterprise spam filter with a sandboxed browser for example).

edit: saw that nicce basically said that a second before I hit post.

nicce• 2 years ago

All the email scanners likely trigger the process anyway.

jameshart7• 2 years ago

Solvable with the right information in the authorizing email.

Remember that the flow the magic link is part of is one you initiate, that causes you to get an email you are expecting.

That email, and the landing and confirmation page it links you to, can explain very clearly that you are only supposed to authorize this if you are trying to log in on known device in known location that is displaying recognizable number on the screen right now.

Findecanor• 2 years ago

BankID scams in Sweden worked because it did not require there to be authentication between the device that logged in and the device that authorised the login.

The victim got a phone call in which the she got manipulated into authorising something in the BankID smartphone app. But what she was actually doing was authorising the attacker to log into her online bank account.

First after several years (of blaming the thousands of victims for their millions lost) did the system start using QR codes on the screen scanned by the smartphone.

ultimoo• 2 years ago

so anyone can log in as you if you receive an email and accidentally click on it?

sbrother• 2 years ago

Or if your mail client, spam filter or anything else tries to prefetch the link...

jeffalyanak• 2 years ago

If you really want to allow for another browser to authenticate a login request, you can at least limit it to sessions coming from the same IP.

That would let you authenticate your desktop browser from an email you opened on your phone if you're on your home network, but without becoming widely exploitable by phishers.

Gigachad7• 2 years ago

To be safe the link can load a page with a form / button that says confirm the login.

Sn0wCoder2• 2 years ago

This is a fair point to bring up.

Most sites will have a confirmation once you click the link that includes the browser version and IP address. I have seen that info only in the email itself too with no confirmation afterwords, but not for some time. Have never seen one that is just a link with nothing else that once clicked allows the other device in but supposes could be implemented that way.

The article itself is about not making them the only option (which is fair), and the OP says if they do it should login the device which originally made the request (which I agree). If the implementation is just an email with only a link, no other information with no confirmation (yes, it's fine to let this device in), then I would have to agree with you it's very risky and could allow anyone to login as you (hopefully no sites are doing this, but...)

Sn0wCoder2• 2 years ago

Agreed! If they all worked like this would be a happy camper. Nothing worse than being in one browser, opening the email, then it opens and authenticates you on the default browser or even better on a different device and needing to forward the link to the other device so you can open it there (yes odd scenario but try not to access certain emails from certain devices).

Sites that send an OTP (crazy-pink-horse-3837) that you can copy, and paste is a good middle ground if implementing the link that just Auths the original request is too difficult.

jameshart7• 2 years ago

Or in the Gmail client on iOS which opens links in an embedded browser.

portaouflop4• 2 years ago

OTP is the only sane option - there are too many edge cases for magic links to make them a good user experience

layer85• 2 years ago

This is bad (phishing). The better solution is have the login only work on the device where the link is opened, and for cross-device use to also provide an OTP code the user can read on the receiving device and easily type in on the initial device. (Or only provide the OTP code and no link.)

jameshart7• 2 years ago

How is that secure against the same phishing attacks that a clickable link is vulnerable to (basically the idea that someone can socially engineer you into a situation where you think you are supposed to complete the auth flow with them, enabling them to sign in as you?)

paxys7• 2 years ago

If you have a halfway competent security team they will never ever let this fly. You are begging your users to get phished.

jameshart7• 2 years ago

A fully competent security team will, on the other hand, carry out a more comprehensive threat modelling exercise and make a pragmatic choice about whether this kind of auth flow is appropriate for your usecase.

The phishing risks for a bank account login are very different than those for a ‘returning player’ login to a casual gaming site for example.

portaouflop4• 2 years ago

Almost no one has a competent security team and if they do they don’t listen to them. Security is just compliance checkboxes and lists nowadays

josephh• 2 years ago

AFAIK, McDonald’s does this with their mobile app (they weren’t letting me log in with my password) But the problem with their implementation was that the magic link that they send you is wrapped in a click tracker whose domain is blocked by pihole (and the likes), and I could not reach the actual auth URL to complete the login process.

portaouflop4• 2 years ago

Many email clients will click the link and invalidate it - for example outlook is a classic here - so the best implementation does not use redirects/links at all.

OTP is far better than an actual magic link - you can still include a link that pre-fills the code.

Spivak• 2 years ago

Yes but clicking the link itself shouldn't log you in. Any implementation of magic links that does this is broken because of link previews.

You click the button on the page which knows the session you're logging in from and link code and does a POST which completes the login. This is how all the "login by scanning QR code" flows work.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

I’ve been stung by this before, where I’d already closed the original browser tab since I assumed the magic link would open a new tab (as they usually do)

catchmeifyoucan• 2 years ago

From a developer perspective, I like magic links. They help verify an e-mail address, and log you in at the same time.

Mystery-Machine5• 2 years ago

Like there's no other way to verify an email address. From a developer perspective, I hate it, because it's yet another functionality that I need to add and support in my app.

Glyptodon3• 2 years ago

Why doesn't sending an OTC to an email and marking it verified if they put in the code also work?

marketneutral• 2 years ago

claude.ai supports only either magic email links or google sign in. definitely a factor in why I prefer ChatGPT.

airstrike• 2 years ago

I also find their magic link annoying, but since claude.com doesn't log me out all of the god damn time like chatgpt.com does, Claude is winning this round too...even though this is not a factor in why I prefer one vs the other.

rtsil• 2 years ago

I just signed up for Claude yesterday and I didn't even realize that I didn't enter a password. It was when I wanted to use it on my phone (with Firefox, not the app) that I realized that there was no Claude entry in my password manager. It made me irrationally angry for about 5 minutes, and had I known it in advance, I would probably not have bothered.

tacker2000• 2 years ago

Also encountered this today and I didnt remember what email I used to login, so I tried both but now I seem to have 2 claude accounts, ugh…

pjerem• 2 years ago

I like the Kagi qrcode login option. You scan the QR code with any device you are already logged in and boom, you can login with a button. Its like steam guard but with no app. It’s in fact so simple that I don’t understand why it’s not universal.

You still need another method for the first login.

NobodyNada• 2 years ago

The biggest disadvantage of this scheme is that if a malicious actor can trick you into scanning an arbitrary QR code, they can get access to your account (by visiting the login page themselves to generate a QR code, and then sending you the code).

Discord implements this feature, and this phishing scheme is extremely common: bots/scammers will message you saying "to access <some desirable content>, please scan this QR code" -- and if you scan the code, the scammers have just taken over your account. It's not much harder than rickrolling someone unless they're savvy enough to be aware of the scam.

Of course this can be mitigated somewhat by putting a big scary confirmation screen that says "don't click continue unless you're trying to log into your account from another device", but 1) users don't read, they just click "continue"; and 2) the attacker controls the narrative before the user clicks the QR code; they can craft the language to make the scary warning screen make sense to the user ("yes, I am trying to log into this discord server that this person sent me an QR code to").

apitman15• 2 years ago

I feel like there should be a way to implement this in a phishing-resistant way. Maybe instead of a QR code some sort of video stream that updates dynamically? That would at least be much more difficult for attackers to pass through to the victim.

Mystery-Machine5• 2 years ago

What makes them tragic:
1. Multiple devices. Who doesn’t use at least a few computers weekly? I don’t have my email on my gaming PC, nor do I have it on my work laptops.

"Who doesn’t use at least a few computers weekly?"

I don't. And many, many other people.

See what I did there? I assumed that everyone's like me, just like you did in your blog post. Without data, both of us are wrong.

----

I'd add that magic links also act as a distraction: you open your email client, and it by default opens your inbox, and you start going through all of those unread emails that you just found in your inbox...

Shopify is a big proponent for magic links because they went all-in on their new "Shop" customer accounts. What a disaster. Branding something with such a generic word as "shop" is terrible and average customer doesn't understand that it's supposed to be a brand name.

kens• 2 years ago

Shop is the same as Shopify? Thank you (seriously) for pointing this out. I've been getting Shop emails and I had no idea.

Mystery-Machine5• 2 years ago

Haha. Thanks for proving my point!

benoliver9992• 2 years ago

I've not seen Shop but always liked the simple ShopPay UX.

codazoda• 2 years ago

I got one of these a couple days ago. I thought it was a well timed scam at first.

Macha2• 2 years ago

"Who doesn’t use at least a few computers weekly?" I don't. And many, many other people.

When you consider that a smartphone is "another" computer (or for many users, the computer that is not the smartphone is the "other" computer), I imagine that number goes way up. Someone using a computer at work and a personal phone, for example.

dbalan• 2 years ago

The 404 article irked me a lot, thanks for writing this.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

You're welcome. Been thinking about it for a few days, and I had to do it. I don't disagree there's some benefits but being told "IT'S BETTER!" annoyed me quite a bit.

rickcarlino2• 2 years ago

Issues I’ve encountered building an app with magic links:

1. Include a fallback sign-in code in your magic link, in case the user needs to log in on a device where accessing their email isn’t practical.

2. Make sure the sign-in link can handle email clients that open links automatically to generate preview screenshots.

3. Ensure the sign-in link works with email clients that use an in-app browser instead of the user’s preferred browser. For example, an iOS user might prefer Firefox mobile, but their email client may force the link to open in an in-app browser based on Safari.

michaelmior3• 2 years ago

Make sure the sign-in link can handle email clients that open links automatically to generate preview screenshots.

Any suggestions on what needs to be handled here? My first thought is UA checking to see if it looks like a real browser.

rickcarlino2• 2 years ago

In my app, I just added an “Almost there!” Page with a button that the user needs to click. I still need to add a fallback option that uses a one time code for the other reasons mentioned above.

nine_k• 2 years ago

E.g. require to click a button to actually sign in, don't consume the token and establish the session on mere URL access.

timfsu• 2 years ago

Using a time-based expiration rather than a usage-based expiration should help

snthd• 2 years ago

The link is a "safe" GET request. The page loaded via the link should do an "unsafe" POST for the login, via javascript with a form button for fallback.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7231#section-4.2.1

The purpose of distinguishing between safe and unsafe methods is to allow automated retrieval processes (spiders) and cache performance optimization (pre-fetching) to work without fear of causing harm. In addition, it allows a user agent to apply appropriate constraints on the automated use of unsafe methods when processing potentially untrusted content.

Exactly the same for email unsubscribe links, or a one click "buy now" link.

paxys7• 2 years ago

Save a browser cookie when the login is initiated. When the link is clicked check if the same cookie is present. If not, ignore it. Expire the link and the cookie after n minutes.

layer85• 2 years ago

1 and 3 are mentioned in the article. It’s still annoying if there is no password option.

mooreds5• 2 years ago

We went to a lot of trouble to make our magic link implementation work with anti-phishing software, corp link checkers and more. https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/629 documents some of the struggle.

I think that a link to a page where you enter a one time code gets around a lot of these issues.

andrei_says_• 2 years ago

I arrived at the same conclusion after going through the steps and seeing that some corporate systems mark the login link as malicious, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Sending a code goes around a lot of issues.

adastra2219• 2 years ago

Why not just support a password?

presentation• 2 years ago

I've had success with sending a code, and the link takes you to a page where the input is pre-filled with the code, and you just have to click "Login".

lelanthran• 2 years ago

I think that a link to a page where you enter a one time code gets around a lot of these issues.

I've done both in my SaaS product - link is GET with the OTP in the link, the target page checks if the link is in the URL, and if not, then the user can type it in.

Only for signup, though. For sign-in, the default is to always have the user type it in.

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

one times codes are very vulnerable to phishing. users are prone to entering codes on any resembling website

paxys7• 2 years ago

3 isn't really possible, because the redirect needs to take you back to the browser session where you initiated the login from.

o9992• 2 years ago

Not necessarily, some services would have the magic link verify the session that triggered it regardless of browser or device.

I assume it generates a session on the post-login screen and authorize that session upon accessing link

pests2• 2 years ago

I might receive a magic link on my phone but then sometimes I'll copy/paste that over to my desktop or another device.

This works on 99% of magic links I've tried except for cases when they are trying to prevent account sharing. I remember the Bird bike app did this, where they required the magic link to be clicked on the same device login was initiated on. I was using my friends account and he would just forward me the link until one day this stopped working.

Groxx6• 2 years ago

It definitely does not.

Have your logging-in session wait for / poll "has visited magic link", and authenticate that session when it's done.

Tons of systems do this. It works great, and it can quite easily work without any web browser at all on the logging-in side because it just needs to curl something -> poll for completion and save the cookies -> curl against the API. A number of oauth flows for e.g. TVs work this way, for instance, because it's a heck of a lot easier than integrating a full browser in the [embedded thing]. Many app-based 2FA (e.g. Duo) works this way too.

yieldcrv3• 2 years ago

One thing I recently found annoying with Slack was that I wanted the company chat on my phone, but I didnt want the company’s email on my phone given the overly broad control of my phone

so I got the magic link on their computer and then I made a qr code

but wait, the email quarantine system had altered the whole link so I had to extract that

but wait the redirect url back to slack was malformed because of the url encoding and i had to fix that and then make the qr code

like wow just give me a qr code or code instead in the original magic link email!

tzs4• 2 years ago

Would it have worked to forward the mail from your work email system to your personal email?

tzs4• 2 years ago

4. Make sure the sign-in link on mobile works with your mobile app.

When McDonald's switched from email/password to magic links I had a hard time getting the magic link to work with the McD app. It usually would just open in the McD website.

Thus was quite annoying because about 98% of the time I eat McD's I would not do so if I could not order via the app [1].

I finally gave up and switched to using "Sign in With Apple" (SIWA). There was no way that I could find to add SIWN to an existing McD account, so had to use the SIWA that hides the real email from McD. That created a new McD account so I lost the reward points that were on the old account, but at least I could again use the McD app.

[1] They have a weekly "Free Medium Fries on Friday" deal in the app available for use on orders of at least $1. Almost every Friday for lunch I make a sandwich at home and then get cookies and the free fries to go with it from McD.

SOLAR_FIELDS4• 2 years ago

I have heard that you are basically paying double what you normally would if you aren’t hunting for deals in mcd’s app these days. How much truth is there to that?

k4rli• 2 years ago

McD app is the absolute worst.

1) rooted or bootloader-unlocked Android devices are not allowed (granted it's easy enough to get past it for now but the checks are still there). 2) 2FA requirements as if anyone would bother to steal coupons from others

It appears that they want ordering burgers to have the same level of enhanced security as banking apps. Not even crypto or trading apps bother to block unlocked devices in such a way. Blocking rooted devices doesn't even make banking apps more secure but for them I can at least understand the reasoning.

ctm922• 2 years ago

These days there's also to consider that some Mail Threat Protection Tools (at least Microsoft Defender in Exchange Online does this) click links in Mails to check them.

Recently ran into this issue as new mail accounts got confirmed automatically and magic links were invalid when the user clicked them, because Microsoft already logged in with it during checking.

aspect0545• 2 years ago

What can you do to prevent automatic confirmation in that case?

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

That seems like a really thoughtless idea.

devnullbrain• 2 years ago

I've had this problem as a user, accidentally previewing a link in iOS by tapping for too long.

littlestymaar3• 2 years ago

These days there's also to consider that some Mail Threat Protection Tools (at least Microsoft Defender in Exchange Online does this) click links in Mails to check them.

What an insane policy, why am I surprised Microsoft came up with it…

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

Come to think of it, magic links by definition violate the principle that GET requests should not change state. Defender & preview tools are actually following the established norms here - norms that were established decades ago precisely because we hit the more broad problem with C, U & D parts of CRUD, and collectively agreed that doing destructive operations on GET requests is stupid.

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

Is 3 even possible?

miki1232112• 2 years ago

One of the biggest advantages of magic links is that they're unphishable while still being easy to use (unlike passkeys).

Having a code completely negates that advantage, as attackers can just set up a fake website that asks for the code.

Magic links should log you in on the device you click them, not on the device that requested the login session. Anything else, while being a little bit less annoying, is a security issue and should be treated as such.

tarxvf2• 2 years ago

That would require I have my email on every device I might want to log in with.

I don't like that for a number of reasons.

hombre_fatal3• 2 years ago

When using magic links, you can still support the common UX polish of letting a user log in on a different browser/device.

If the user opens the magic link in the same browser that initiated the email, then just log them in. Otherwise, present them with the Apple-style "Do you want to authorize a login from 1.2.3.4 using Firefox on iOS possibly located in Portland, Maine? [Authorize] or [Reject]".

KronisLV• 2 years ago

For example, an iOS user might prefer Firefox mobile, but their email client may force the link to open in an in-app browser based on Safari.

Hey, wasn’t Firefox on iOS based on Safari related tech anyways?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox

However, as with all other iOS web browsers, the iOS version uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko due to platform requirements.

I do agree with what you’re saying though! Just those two in particular will probably have pretty good compatibility, which I was amused to find out when I looked into it.

scott_w3• 2 years ago

Honestly, having run a number of experiments with magic link, I wouldn’t recommend them. We saw our login success drop noticeably. We tried a few different approaches over the course of a quarter but even our best attempt only mitigated the drop compared to having email/password and Google Login.

Obviously, your mileage may vary but it was a good reminder to always validate your assumptions, especially in your critical user flows.

sebastiennight6• 2 years ago

I'm super interested as we've been debating adding email/password (since we only use Magic Links at the moment).

How are you tracking login success rates?

scott_w3• 2 years ago

Pretty straightforward: you send an event for which variation your user saw and another when they login, attaching the login method to the attributes.

You can use Mixpanel or Heap, which have mechanisms for mapping the non-logged-in user to your verified user on login, though you might need a bit of custom code to do it.

scarface_742• 2 years ago

Stratechery, powered by Passport, uses this type of scheme (click link OR type in OTP), which is still shifting annoyances onto end-users to free developers from implementing passkeys, but at least has a bit more of an appreciation for end-users.

With Stratechery, once you get to the website with the magic link, I can then copy the authenticated podcast RSS feed to Overcast and the authenticated RSS feed for the articles to NetNewsWire.

Those subscriptions are then synced to Overcast and NNW on my iPad and Mac via iCloud.

Each podcast RSS link is personalized and you go to the show notes page and click on the link to Manage your account. It will take you to the website using the embedded browser where you can manage your subscription and get access to the various feeds.

Speaking of Overcast, even though its doesn’t create a username and password by default, you can create one. But it’s only to access the web version of Overcast.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

Yeah the Stratechery implementation for podcasts is great. The more annoying thing is each of them has its own domain and requires logging in, if you don't know you can dig into Stratechery.com. I would prefer if I could login to it with a passkey or username+pwd, but it's a much better system overall than just dropping an email link.

scarface_742• 2 years ago

Once you subscribe to one of the podcasts, you can choose the “Manage your account” link from the podcast notes and choose the “Delivery Tab”.

It will give you all of the links to all of your podcasts. I did this from the “Dithering” podcast notes

https://imgur.com/a/ThbTaly

yawaramin6• 2 years ago

Way better option: emailed OTP code and passkey with Conditional Mediation UI. If the user is logging in from a device that already has a passkey, the CM UI will let them just select it and log in instantly. If they are logging in from a device which doesn't, we can make the UX such that it asks them to enter the emailed code, and after that is successfully it immediately asks the user to set up a passkey for instant sign-in.

This gets the best of both worlds: the security of passkeys on existing devices, and the passwordless setup and account recovery for new devices.

Bonus: it even avoids vendor lock-in where cloud providers have all your passkeys.

pat2man• 2 years ago

Asking users to enter an emailed code does not protect against MITM attacks unfortunately

yawaramin6• 2 years ago

True, but pushing passkeys as the primary auth method reduces the risk to a great extent. It's a huge difference. As long as the user keeps using a relatively stable set of devices, they will 'approximately never' be exposed to MITM.

Also, when logging in from a new device, many accounts which use password-based auth today send a confirmation email and ask users to either enter the emailed code or click on the link. This is part of their existing security protocol. So we are not introducing a new unique thing here.

ejs2• 2 years ago

I usually implement the whole username/password auth flow, but recently used only magic links for a simple application.

Since the application only sends a weekly email (a markdown template for goal/task tracking) it seemed easier to just use a magic link, only.

I am happy at how much easier the auth code ended up, and fail to see much downside for such an application.

I'm not sure it would be a good system for more complex apps and services.

benoliver9992• 2 years ago

I have a system where users log in extremely infrequently. Tempting to move away from username & password because they just reset every time anyway.

ejs2• 2 years ago

Yeah - that's my thought too, the service I use them for is not something people often log into. Sometimes never.

t0mas88• 2 years ago

I recently encountered a food delivery website that insisted on a magic link / 2FA code check after a password login. Come on... I'm trying to order a pizza.

If you want strong security, offer passkey login. It's safer than email and much more user friendly especially with FaceID/TouchID on Apple devices.

kleiba2• 2 years ago

Sorry to ask - I don't have personal experience using such a system.

Would it be possible to bookmark the login link so that in the future I don't first have to go to my email in order to log into the service?

Gigachad7• 2 years ago

No. The links are temporary.

kleiba2• 2 years ago

Oh, I see. Thanks! So, they're basically the second part of 2FA?

davewasthere• 2 years ago

And worse (sometimes) consumed by email scanners. There's all sorts of hassles with them. Email deliverability often an issue too.

hmof• 2 years ago

You stay logged in due to cookies. You don't need to keep the login link.

ale422• 2 years ago

Except that some people prefer to purge cookies when closing their browsers. And the session typically doesn't last forever, even if you keep the cookies.

lolinder12• 2 years ago

Am I misunderstanding something, or are passkeys not actually an alternative to magic links?

Every implementation of passkeys I've seen has presented me with the option to create a passkey after I've already logged in with some other method. I'll admit that I haven't dug into it deeply, but the UX I've been presented with consistently makes passkeys appear to be an alternative to the "Remember this computer" button, not to passwords in general. Somehow the service has to know that this new device is authorized. I know depending on the provider there's such a thing as passkey syncing, but that doesn't solve the problem of getting the initial authentication done.

The key insight with magic links is that your security system is no stronger than its recovery mechanism. We are never going to get to a world where passkeys are treated as the only authentication mechanism—there will always be a recovery mechanism, and in most cases an automated one via email. Given that that is the case, magic links simplify things by just not pretending that we have a more secure layer on top. By making the recovery mechanism the primary means by which you interact with the authentication flow you're being more honest about the actual security of your auth system.

Edit: filmgirlcw has a link to an article that is much better than this one that explains how the two actually complement each other: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42628226

Glyptodon3• 2 years ago

The first thing I thought when I read this is how can the author make the specific criticisms of links/otp codes and then suggest passkeys, which have pretty much the same issues x10. Like if using a OTP from your phone or copying a link from your phone when using a work PC to visit a website is a pain, how much easier/better/same is it to try and have your work computer work with your personal passkey from a laptop or something?

avianlyric3• 2 years ago

how much easier/better/same is it to try and have your work computer work with your personal passkey from a laptop or something?

Passkeys support authentication via a secondary device over Bluetooth (and this is supported in every major browser on every major platform). So you can login to a site on a machine that’s completely disconnected from your personal passkey store by scanning a QR code with your personal phone.

The login flow basically goes “request login with passkey” -> “browser recognises it doesn’t have the needed passkey, and offers a QR code to scan” -> “scan QR code with phone” -> “phone and browser handshake via Bluetooth” -> “passkey handshake happens between website and phone” -> “login completes”.

I’ve personally used this flow with my work laptop and my personal iPhone many times. iOS has built in support for the Passkey QR codes, so you can scan the code with the standard camera app. Additionally iOS supports allowing 3rd party passwords managers to take over the Passkey flow once you’ve scanned the QR code. So in my case I complete the flow with 1Password.

End-to-end the flow is pretty damn seamless, I’ve never personally had it fail, and take 30seconds to complete. The most annoying part is trying to remember where my phone is.

filmgirlcw4• 2 years ago

I think as Ricky wrote last week [1], they should augment Magic Links or other auth methods. There are some positives about Magic Links for sure (though I don't know if making your email an even stronger attack vector is necessarily one of them), but for people who use a password manager, for example, they are a definite friction point that I think passkeys most certainly could alleviate.

There are definite UX problems around passkeys that could be improved and I think exporting will make syncing across systems a lot better (one of the reasons I use 1Password as my primary password and passkey system is so I can use my passkeys across devices; of course it helps that my employer uses 1Password as our system so I am logged into my personal and enterprise accounts and can auth then from personal or work devices, provided additional auth or enrollment isn't needed) -- but if the problem as 404 defines it is that they don't want to be responsible or even have to worry about storing your passwords/auth controls, I think passkeys is at least better for a subset of users than Magic Links.

But again, like Ricky, I don't think it should be viewed as either or. It should be both.

[1] https://rmondello.com/2025/01/02/magic-links-and-passkeys/

lolinder12• 2 years ago

Thank you for the link! I saw your other comment and actually edited mine to point to that, because it's definitely the answer to my question!

though I don't know if making your email an even stronger attack vector is necessarily one of them

I'm unconvinced that magic links do make your email an even stronger attack vector. Essentially every service that would be inclined to use magic links would already have a way to reset your password entirely once the email is compromised. All magic links do is make this the primary way to interact with the auth flow.

The bad guys already know that your email is the best target. Magic links just make that very explicit.

adastra2219• 2 years ago

There are some positives about Magic Links for sure

Like what? I'm failing to come up with a single benefit (for the user).

Gigachad7• 2 years ago

Passkeys are in a transition period right now. There is no reason you have to have an alternative login method if you are using Passkeys, but no service has switched over to being Passkey only yet. Some users on older OSs / Linux might not be able to generate and store Passkeys yet, many users are not using a cross platform credential manager so if you've created passkeys with iCloud Passwords, there isn't a way to log in via linux right now.

Give it a few more years and I suspect we will start to see services start with creating a passkey and never collecting a password. The passkey portability specs will be implemented, and hopefully Gnome/KDE implement passkey support.

lolinder12• 2 years ago

What does the final end state of passkeys look like? What happens if I lose the device I created the passkey on, if it gets bricked, or if I get banned by the platform that was supposed to be syncing my passkeys?

superq2• 2 years ago

hopefully Gnome/KDE implement passkey support

sigh TBH, I hope not. Maybe optionally, but for now the friction might keep companies from going passkey only, which (I think) would be a total nightmare from a security and usability perspective.

filmgirlcw4• 2 years ago

I think this is really great as a response to 404's post last week. I love 404 but I'm as annoyed by Magic Links as OP for the same reasons they mention.

Ricky Mondello wrote a really great blog last week[1] about how passkeys, as OP alludes to at the end, can be used alongside Magic Links, that I think is worth a read.

[1] https://rmondello.com/2025/01/02/magic-links-and-passkeys/

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

Thanks for that link, I had not seen it and if I had known Ricky Mondello had written that, I probably wouldn't have bothered.

I'm still used to Apple people being almost completely invisible publicly.

filmgirlcw4• 2 years ago

thanks for writing what you wrote -- I think it's important that we have this conversation as broadly as we can

cmiller12• 2 years ago

I'm confused, what's going on here? Is there a reason you wouldn't have bothered reading a post from that specific person?

lolinder12• 2 years ago

Thank you, this is a better piece than TFA! Reading TFA I was rather confused at how passkeys are an alternative to magic links—it makes a lot more sense to view them as a complement. Magic links allow you access to passkeys, which are basically "Remember this Computer" on steroids.

danudey2• 2 years ago

I haven't had these specific issues with magic links specifically, but I do remember when Epic launched the Epic Games Store and they would e-mail you two-factor codes to log in. I consistently had issues where I wanted to log into their store, got prompted to enter the two-factor code they e-mailed me, got no email for several minutes, requested another code, didn't get that either, gave up and did something else, and then got both codes 30 minutes later.

The fact is that even in the best of times, e-mail isn't reliable. Things go to your junk folder. Links get blocked by work spam filters. Mailboxes get full (I assume? it's been a while).

Personally, I have my e-mail on my iPhone and anywhere else (work laptop or gaming PC) I have to log into icloud.com to check my e-mail; it's cumbersome. Let me put in a password. Let me scan a QR code like embedded devices do. Give me at least one other option.

cco• 2 years ago

As someone that does this for a living, 100%. Email OTP is a great alternative that splits the difference of magic links vs passwords.

Agreed with some other folks that Passkeys is not a replacement for email verification.

MrDunham2• 2 years ago

Adding to the article:

I seriously HATE magic links. My email inbox is barely better a social network's time suck. Lots of urgent, little important, wrecks any flow I had.

Forcing me into my inbox is highly likely to cause me to forget about the reason I was there (to get into your app). Or, at best, it slows me way down and nearly always breaks my flow.

Perhaps this is acceptable for the security boost (?) for the average user, but man, when I get forced into magic links I sometimes just abandon the app altogether.

Disclaimer: 1. I have/pay for a password manager, which helps with the forgotten password problem a lot. It also allows me to have extremely hard-to-crack passwords.

digging2• 2 years ago

Totally agreed - a correctly used password manager is many, many times easier and faster to use than so-called magic links. It's not even a contest.

I'd even say magic link emails border on misuse of email; they're a fundamentally different form of communication from all other uses of email. It's not easy on neurodivergent brains to deal with that combination of pollution (magic links in my inbox) and distraction (actual emails in my face when I'm trying to log in and was not trying to check my email). Protonmail's client could really make my day if they found a way to reliably separate those 2 channels so I didn't have to even open my inbox to get login codes/links.

What I don't understand is why I've never been prompted to use a password manager by any site with a signup flow. It seems easier to normalize their use through messaging than keep acting like passwords are supposed to be something you consciously remember. Nobody should remember their passwords, except for maybe 2-3. But now we're moving toward a world where login just means more friction and less control instead...

Uvix• 2 years ago

Trying to explain to users of an unrelated site how to use a password manager sounds like a support nightmare.

8organicbits• 2 years ago

Magic links breaking my flow is my top issue as well. My inbox is distracting: don't send me there. One affordance I've seen was a site that detected I was using gmail and crafted a link like https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/example.com, which brought me directly to the email I needed, while hiding everything else. I think it did a MX lookup to guess my provider.

I wish magic links would go away, but if they need to stay, that approach was the least terrible.

MrDunham2• 2 years ago

Good point! I've seen this search link setup before and it was... somewhat palatable. Still more bad than good but at least better UX.

babyent• 2 years ago

I use magic links for my enterprise application. In my humble opinion I believe magic links are fine.

Almost everyone outside of some HN users use email regularly. They have it open on a second monitor and it is an important part of their workflow.

If their companies are not super tech savvy and not using SSO, the users probably at least have a company email address they’re logged into.

I don’t think it’s worth over optimizing for a small percentage of users. Worst case scenario you need to contact support.

99% of enterprise users will be fine with magic links, compared to dealing with people who use horribly weak passwords. Most of them seem to prefer them to passwords.

SSO is always best option if available but magic links are definitely second.

Malcx• 2 years ago

Magic links are so useful in specific circumstances. We have a client with hundreds of users that infrequently need access to a bespoke tool. Setting up and managing user accounts for them is out of the question, but a magic link letting them sign in using an email of their corporate domain solves the issue easily.

rubslopes• 2 years ago

I'm having a good experience with a recently implemented magic link system. I did it via WhatsApp instead of email, which is much more reliable. Of course, this is only possible because in my country every single person uses WhatsApp.

I'm building something for a very tech illiterate audience, and everybody loves the simplicity of it.

apitman15• 2 years ago

I've wondered about doing this. Does WhatsApp let you send messages to arbitrary users via an API?

aembleton• 2 years ago

Yes https://business.whatsapp.com/products/conversation-categori...

dpifke9• 2 years ago

I've been a loyal Mercury customer for a while now, but their forced use of magic links as a third authentication factor any time my IP address changes (after authenticating with a secure password from my password manager and after a valid TOTP) has me ready to move my company's banking elsewhere.

I could understand requiring a third factor to authenticate if signing in from a different location or a different ISP than I've been using for the past 5 years, but it's ridiculous to do so if nothing has changed (except the final octet of my DHCP-assigned address) since I last signed in yesterday. I use a different computer (via SSH) to read my email than I do for web browsing, and cutting-and-pasting a signin link that's hundreds of characters long (spanning multiple lines in Emacs, so I have to manually remove \ where it crosses line boundaries) is a PITA.

Adding friction on every sign-in colors all subsequent interactions I have with an app, and makes me hate using it.

MaxGabriel4• 2 years ago

I’m the CTO of Mercury

You shouldn’t get the device verification requirement if you’ve used the device before (we store a permanent cookie to check this) or for the same IP. Any chance your cookies are being cleared regularly?

We added this after attackers created clones of http://mercury.com and took out Google ads for it. When customers entered their password and TOTP on the phishing site, the phisher would use their credentials to login and create virtual cards and buy crypto/gold/etc. The phisher would also redirect the user to the real Mercury and hope they figured it was a blip.

This device verification link we send authorizes the IP/device you open it on, which has almost entirely defeated the phishers.

Since WebAuthn is immune to this style of phishing attack, we don’t require device verification if you use it. I highly recommend using TouchID/FaceID or your device’s flavor of WebAuthn if you can—it’s more convenient and more secure. You can add it here: https://app.mercury.com/settings/security

That said, we are talking internally about your post and we do recognize that as IPv6 gets more traction IPs will rotate much more regularly, so we’ll think if we should loosen restrictions on being a same-IP match.

dpifke9• 2 years ago

Yes, I clear cookies every time I close my browser, as a layered approach to privacy on top of uBlock Origin and NoScript. There isn't a great way to exclude certain sites from this, other than setting up a dedicated web browser in a container just for Mercury.

I wasn't aware that WebAuthn didn't have this requirement. I prefer TOTP because I actually like having a second factor in addition to a credential stored on my computer's hard drive (whether a password or a private key in my password manager), but I might be willing to reduce my security posture to get rid of this annoyance.

One suggestion: the link would be half as annoying if it was easily cut-and-pasteable rather than a long email-open-tracking link spanning multiple lines. This is what it looks like when I copy it out of my email:

  https://email.mg.mercury.com/c/eJxMzs1u4jAUBeCncXZB9vVfvPACZshoWIwYoiasdgkra2KV_JCGqPTpK-imq7xxx40vlO9IKia6ggL6zUlQHObdF6\
  JI0alRHBWQvWKRuD4loLZxsJSRXZAwfNBQeQWozasdgeWsMyFZozE4RKZ4d151NOFtuq9w6IqLb-d5fGdyzaBmUIdx_NkzqBeacrqXkZaMxGSNQyQmf7_9GW7\
  Hf1cJ8zW9TshAwwba3ccLuN3u_r_PR9j_GkxxxmadDu32c59jMfkYFmKKP0baIT0vzP4ynHN_-yyhZOTy9jmPPQn6gL-VLMfvvIA_XxbywRYhUbZUp0RpVCUC\
  qDsbasJHeObFMZ4YrFw1cAAAD__4XPZXw

I have to manually remove the backslashes and re-combine the lines before pasting into my web browser.

Edit to add: looks like email.mg.mercury.com is hosted by Mailgun. Are you intentionally sharing these authentication tokens with a third party by serving them through this redirect? Do your security auditors know about this?

m4632• 2 years ago

I like the schemes that send a numeric verification code that you manually type in without an email link. can also use a text message. Maybe allow this to be configured.

security = 1/convenience

but also vice versa

miyuru• 2 years ago

IPv6 gets more traction IPs will rotate much more regularly

unfortunately, only few ISPs do IPv6 correctly by assigning a fixed prefix to customers. most of the ISPs apply the ipv4 logic when adding ipv6 planning hence this situation.

hopefully this will improve in the future and more stable prefixes will be given to users.

o9992• 2 years ago

Most internet users (who aren't tech savvy and will never be) will find magic link || mailed OTP way easier than passkeys accross devices, etc..

lxe• 2 years ago

I don’t have my email on my gaming PC, nor do I have it on my work laptops.

What? You have your email on literally every device -- be honest.

dgrove• 2 years ago

Just because you make exceptions doesn't mean everyone else does

mrweasel• 2 years ago

Nope, I don't have email on my phone. This breaks magic links all the time for me. In many situations I wouldn't even be able to configure my phone to show me my email, because I don't know the password, it's in my password manager and is lke 52 random characters.

I think it's interesting that the author has chosen to not have email on PCs, but I can see why. I also completely get why they'd opt to not have private email on a work laptop.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

I don't have my home email on work devices. I also don't have my email on my gaming PC (I agree this must be rarer). I don't have all of my work emails on my personal devices either. So now when I log in I need to DM myself links over Slack, or forward emails around...

dandigangi• 2 years ago

Been saying this for a bit now. OTP/magic links have some upsides but the second your SMS or email provider doesn't deliver said thing your users are in trouble.

n144q• 2 years ago

My data point as an edge case: on a certain website, I have a throwaway account registered with a throwaway gmail account. I don't use that gmail account for anything else, and in order not to affect my regular Gmail login, I use incognito window. Now, whenever I need to log in to the website on a new device, I have to also login gmail as well (since the login credentials are never kept between sessions). This has been very annoying, and would not happen with password with 2FA.

sergiotapia• 2 years ago

Just use email and password, companies. Please. I have a password manager, I will stop using your service if it's a pain to login.

Even something small thing like email -> hit enter -> then we show password input, will cause me to stop using your service.

ivanjermakov• 2 years ago

I was surprised to learn how many people never save passwords and just reset it via email whenever they need to log in.

lyime2• 2 years ago

I don't like magic links but OTP code via email or sms has preferable set of trade-offs.

paxys7• 2 years ago

I'm okay with magic links IF the website using it doesn't invalidate my session for no reason after some random period. If I have to do the email song and dance every week I'm very likely to eventually not bother with the product (looking at you Claude).

FriedPickles• 2 years ago

Calling these links 'magic' is an insult to magicians who spent years mastering actual sorcery. We're just passing around URL-encoded tokens.

Halian• 2 years ago

I *hate* magic links. Just let me use a damn password.

theltrj• 2 years ago

Thank you for writing this! Getting users to implicitly trust clicking a link as a login mechanism....what could possibly go wrong?

shoelessone• 2 years ago

I completely agree. I find magic links much more of a hassle than a password.

tonymet• 2 years ago

Or the involuntary option. Here is an example from Lowes

1. enter username

2. choose password or magic link (select password)

3. enter password properly

4. Thank you for logging in. Please click your magic link to log in.

Why did you waste my time putting in a password when the magic link was the only option?

perryizgr8• 2 years ago

I once had an app send me a code in the email. But if I opened my email app to check the code, and then return to the app to enter it, it would lose context! It would ask me to enter my email again, and proceeded to send a new code. There was no way to log in using only my phone.

shark_laser• 2 years ago

Nostr Login using NIP07 is amazing.

There's even cooler ways that are already working including nsec bunkers.

This is the way of the future IMHO, most people just don't know it yet.

gregates• 2 years ago

I suspect a hidden "benefit" to the companies implementing this is that it makes it much harder to share your account. You are probably happy to share your Netflix password with your mom, but not your email password.

They can present it as a "more secure" login method, obscuring the reason they actually like it.

pcchristie• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure Medium (who was the first implementation of this that I know of) uses it as a way of blocking pay wall bypassers (which on Medium I think manipulated/deleted cookies to get around the 3 article limit).

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

Yeah that would not surprise me, in general. I don't think that would be 404's goal, since they provide full-text RSS feeds I could share with a friend easily, but I could see that happening with other services.

rednafi• 2 years ago

Username and password combo works. All these ceremonies around OAuth, passkeys, and magic links solved one problem but introduced two more. My job as a service provider isn’t to coddle people who can’t be bothered to use a password manager.

Auth is the worst part of building a service and sucks all the fun out of it. API auth is a mess because people can’t keep a token string secret. Now we need JWTs, OAuth, token refreshing, and a whole bunch of BS that no one enjoys.

One reason why OpenAI and Anthropic APIs are so much more fun to use than Google and AWS offerings is that you get a token and are responsible for keeping it safe. It makes the entire workflow dead simple. I’m not creating a new project or fiddling with IAM just to try out an endpoint.

tptacek• 2 years ago

Your job as a service provider is, in fact, to minimize the likelihood that you will manage to communicate the passwords of your users to outsiders, because those passwords are very likely to be shared. That passwords should not be shared doesn't reduce your responsibility.

jerieljan• 2 years ago

Every time I see magic links, I always think: "I thought we weren't supposed to click links in emails in the first place?".

When links in email come into mind, so does phishing.

I hate these magic links a lot.

crazygringo5• 2 years ago

Is anyone confused by that? Password reset links have always been sent to email.

The point is not to click suspicious links. If you know a magic link was sent, it's not suspicious.

That being said, I hate them just for the delay.

SV_BubbleTime2• 2 years ago

Ok. So now my users get random login links for sites we may or may not use… sure, you Silicon Valley Cool Guy aren’t going to fall for it, but my blue collar Detroit UAW guys might.

Click that stupid magic link for a service we use, and they’re asked for their Office 365 credentials… all the while I’m telling them not to click links in emails.

adastra2219• 2 years ago

I don't like password reset links either. Send me a code I can type in, but only to the original browser session.

tylersmith• 2 years ago

Nobody is actually confused, it's just performative whining.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

As someone in the security industry, I find it amazing how much we've told people (in awareness training) to "not click things on the thing-clicking machine™" while simultaneously having processes like password resets that require doing it.

™Kelly Shortridge 2021 (https://x.com/swagitda_/status/1503751776134180873)

makeitdouble• 2 years ago

Fake password reset links are also a common attack vector, so yes people are told to be also cautious of those.

Otherwise it's been a while I haven't seen an reset link instead of a reset code. Copy/pasting is not much of a hassle, and it works even if the mail is checked on a different device.

The only real link I had to deal with were app callbacks that were explicitly labeled as such (with instructions from the app to explain what to expect)

efreak• 2 years ago

Be careful of those as well, but in this case it's quite simple: password reset links should only be sent when the user explicitly requests them; of you receive an unexpected email asking you to reset your password, don't click the link.

m4632• 2 years ago

I don't even load images. email address -> ip address.

apple's email privacy scheme seems interesting (apple always loads all images), but I don't know if there are drawbacks.

muppetman2• 2 years ago

Magic link are so, so stupid. Sure, make it an option for Grandma, but don't trot them out like they're amazing, they're terrible. God I hate the way the Internet is going - idiots making technical decisions.

dmattia• 2 years ago

They are sometimes required. Say you are on a mailing list for some company you gave your email to at some checkout counter one time, and you want to unsubscribe. You probably don't have an actual account with a login with that retailer, they just have your email address.

In this case, what alternative is there than having a magic link in the footer of that email that says "unsubscribe" that includes a token unique to that email address that acts as proof of owning an email account when you then click that link and ask to unsubscribe?

ale422• 2 years ago

There are many options where such links are a reasonable option. I'm okay to receive such a link to validate my e-mail for an account creation, or to unsubscribe from a mailing list at a place I don't have an account at, or to display an order status page at a shop where I ordered as a guest without creating an accoung.

But using them as the only option to login is really, really annoying. Mails can get trapped in spam filters, delayed by intermediate server overload or spam filters that sometimes take 10 minutes, servers doing graylisting... Plus all the other annoyances listed in the article (e.g. multi-device users, in-app browsers). At the very least, support passkeys if you really don't want to store (hashed) passwords. And no, SMS is not an alternative: I was several times barred from logging in to a service because SMS wasn't properly working (can happen easily while roaming abroad).

muppetman2• 2 years ago

Yes, sorry. I mean in the same way as the other person who's replied to you. Don't give me an "account" somewhere I'm expected to use on a regular basis but require me to use magic links.

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

What a good idea to get people used to clicking on a link in an email to login. Magic opportunities.

albert_e2• 2 years ago

Fun domain name.

Unfortunately blocked on my (work) network -- classified as miscellaneous / unknown category.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

I have to admit I bought it mostly to annoy a few very specific friends, but then I kept using it. I would not recommend trying to host anything serious on such a TLD.

If you check the early comments on the thread I posted the full content for someone else who could not reach .zip domains.

ahmedhanks• 2 years ago

No issues for me.

SV_BubbleTime2• 2 years ago

Expensify.

We dumped them for a host of reasons, but included in there was their use of tragic link logins.

Absolute clowns. Glad to see this practice getting the negative attention it deserves.

adastra2219• 2 years ago

I refuse to use any service that only supports magic links for auth. It is incredibly user-hostile, and absolutely worse from a security perspective than passwords (with a password manager). Most critically it simply does not work in my personal setup where I do not have access to my email account from the machine I am using to login, precisely for security reasons and the safety of my accounts.

Anthropic has been the once exception to this personal policy simply because Claude is the best LLM out there. But it's a mountain of pain every time I have to re-login, and I've complained to them multiple times about this.

apitman15• 2 years ago

Sadly not enough people use password managers for it to be worth it for companies to target those flows.

adastra2219• 2 years ago

60% of Internet users rely on a password manager, and that number is still growing by a significant amount each year.

budding2141• 2 years ago

absolutely worse from a security perspective than passwords

Is it though? Majority (if not all) services I frequently use have email as recovery option for forgotten passwords.

adastra2219• 2 years ago

It is certainly not all, and most security conscious sites offer other recovery options like one time use codes. Many also allow for time delayed account recovery, which aren’t a usable option for magic links.

In any case the correct approach here is to fix password reset/account recovery (e.g. with social key recovery) rather than reduce everything to the lowest common denominator.

It also can be said to lower security because it instills the behavior of clicking on links in incoming emails as a standard practice.

_tom_• 2 years ago

Yeah, and everyone who did not flunk security training knows not to click on the links.

Don't send me a link, tell me where to find it, after I log in.

doener• 2 years ago

Oh I hate how Slack uses this. Because if extensive use of magic links I lost track about my two accounts and several spaces.

Terr_• 2 years ago

Of course, as stated in the article, such email links are harder to phish than passwords

On the other hand, training users to expect and use hard-to-read login-links in emails is not really good either. It promotes a broad range of scams, phishing, and potential malicious code exploits, even if the a particular sender's site has been hardened somehow. (e.g. a TOTP app on a phone.)

sebastiennight6• 2 years ago

We've been using Magic Links for a few years (and yes, one reason was to avoid the security issue of storing user passwords when we were just at MVP stage) and found the top problems with it are:

1. Some users (0.1%) just don't ever get the email. We tried sending from our IP, sending from MailGun, sending from PostMark, having a multi-tier retry from different transactional tools. Still, some people just will not ever be able to log in.

2. People click old Magic Links and get frustrated when a 6-month old link "doesn't work". We've decided to remedy that by showing them a page that re-sends the link and explains the situation (like Docusign does) instead of an error message.

3. People will routinely mis-spell their email and then blame the system when they don't get the code.

All of this still results, I feel, in way fewer support tickets than the email+password paradigm, so I'm still in favor of Magic links.

tjoff• 2 years ago

... but the usability is a nightmare.

graemep• 2 years ago

Absolutely. Users have to wait for the email before signing in, it does not work on devices without email without copying the link, etc.

255kb3• 2 years ago

It's indeed interesting the number of people misspelling their email address, or having an inbox so full that it cannot receive emails anymore.

I never tried to add magix links, but I added Google Sign in to my SaaS several month ago, and since then, it accounts for more than 90% of new sign-ups (users are devs, so rather tech savvy and privacy aware). I'm now convinced that no other method is a priority (I still have email/password of course).

yvoschaap• 2 years ago

The number of support requests I got last year because of [hotmail|gmail|msn|yahoo].con > 30

watermelon03• 2 years ago

Wouldn't privacy aware users prefer passkeys or passwords, instead of any kind of SSO?

In general, I do understand that use of SSO is due to convenience. Especially since in many cases websites provide less friction when signing up via SSO instead of using username+password.

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

but I added Google Sign in to my SaaS several month ago, and since then, it accounts for more than 90% of new sign-ups (users are devs, so rather tech savvy

I do it for services I don't care about. In my mind it is more privacy for me. Keeps you out of my real inbox and my password out of your system and I believe that I can - to some extend - remove myself without having to go through whatever crap account deletion process that services has tried to cobble together.

Worst offenders let me login with google and then immediately asks for name and phone number or email and asks me to verify it.

kstrauser2• 2 years ago

I have my HN username at a venerable webmail service. I check it about once a year, tops. My name isn't unimaginably rare, but neither is it "Smith".

I am shocked, shocked, by the number of different K. Strauser people who have typed that email address into some random website or another. I've gotten bank notifications, loan documents, Facebook signup info, meeting minutes from some random volunteer work, and all kinds of other things. When I can figure out from context who the intended recipient is, I try to let them know so they can fix it. On one occasion, the person sent me back a swear-laden diatribe for "hacking their email". Sigh.

I think this has made me a better engineer, though. When someone says something in a meeting like "...as long as they type their email correctly", I can jump in and address that myth head-on. No, people will not type it correctly. If it's a minor pain in the neck for me, with an uncommon name, I can only imagine the traffic that the world's John Smith's get.

watermelon03• 2 years ago

Email should not be considered a secure channel.

Username+password (or passkeys) with a password manager (which ensures that credentials are used on the correct domain) via HTTPS is probably the only end-to-end encrypted way of exchanging credentials with good UX for general public.

danenania2• 2 years ago

With password reset, you are also trusting email.

Jolter3• 2 years ago

If you are storing sensitive information in the system, by all means, you should act accordingly and require higher-security login than magic links. But if you do, you really should not be accepting username+password either. You need to at least put some 2FA on there to step up one level of security. And not SMS- or email-based 2FA either.

90% of web apps don't handle that kind of information, and for them a magic link is at least as good as passwords (as this article explains). Those that do handle things like personally identifiable information (beyond an email address) really should be enforcing 2FA or proper electronic IDs.

There is a whole profession writing recommendations about information security, and every web developer needs to be able to do this kind of analysis at a rudimentary level. We don't need to wing it, we can analyze security requirements in a systematic way.

flessner• 2 years ago

Also what's the reasoning behind not wanting to store passwords?

It's not like the rest of the customer's data is not valuable? If you don't feel comfortable storing passwords, the amount of data I'd trust you with is strictly zero.

danenania2• 2 years ago

The UX debate is valid, but magic links (and emailed one-time codes) are clearly more secure than password + password reset. Control of the email account gets you in either way. Passwords are an additional attack vector.

Kiro• 2 years ago

In my country even the social security number of people is public information.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

To be fair to 404, they're trying to limit the amount of data they hold which IS good, but in the end they need to have the email address of subscribers.

lolinder12• 2 years ago

No, kudos to them for looking at a piece of data and asking themselves if it's worth storing—more companies should do that with more data. It's not that the rest of the data isn't valuable to some extent, it's that every piece you have makes the blast radius of a leak that much bigger, so why hold stuff you don't need?

Planning for a breach doesn't make you more likely to have one—if anything it makes you less likely!

skerit• 2 years ago

Magic links can be very useful, but for some users the issue is in only supporting magic links.

cchance• 2 years ago

Funny part is most of those apply to passwords too, using an old password and complaining its not working, mistyping shit and complaining that its the system, and requesting a password reset and not getting the mail LOL so i only see upsides

Helmut10001• 2 years ago

Revolut [1] does this and while I like their service overall, I hate the login mails. My email box is full of these login mails and it feels like abuse of the email system to me. I have all kinds of alternatives, Yubikey, TOTP, Password Manager etc. - everything would be better than this magic login link.

[1] https://www.revolut.com

usr1106• 2 years ago

So in case of temporary email delivery problem no banking?

I had this case recently: Sending a job application, so wanting to check what my LinkedIn actually says (I don't use or even update LinkedIn regularly). Now LinkedIn thinks my login looks suspicious and sends a confirmation email. (It does that nearly every time the rare cases I log in, probably because I delete cookies.) But the mail doesn't arrive. My email provider is usually very reliable, but later I learned that just in this moment they experienced multi-hour delays. While this was not a magic link it shows that any login requiring a quick email delivery can fail in the worst moment.

jackthemuss• 2 years ago

It’s hard to do right. I made mailslurp for this reason to allow end to end testing of magic link flows using disposable email accounts.

justin_• 2 years ago

Related thread from September 2024:

    The "email is authentication" pattern
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41475218

Some users use email flows, such as "magic links", instead of bothering with passwords at all.

Jean-Papoulos• 2 years ago

Most users do live with a single device. If they have a work computer, they also have a work email (the client of which is unfortunately probably already opened for other reason when they want to login to the site).

The most-devices people I know are those who have a laptop, phone and tablet. That's it, I literally cannot think of anyone I know with more then this, and most of those with tablets are using it for games or reading or for the kids.

Magic links are indeed the best solution for the average user. Type in your email with autocomplete, get a notification from the mailbox, click, click, and you're in.

wpm• 2 years ago

“Type in your email with autocomplete, get a notification from the mailbox, click, click, and you're in.”

My autocomplete can fill a password or passkey in too. Don’t waste my time.

timvisee• 2 years ago

I do have a good use case for magic links.

I creates a bar management/sales platform for our group of friends. It's self service so people purchase their products on their phone and pay later.

People get... intoxicated... after which passwords appear to become quite the problem. Magic links solved that.

To solve the multi device and in-app browser problem people can also open the links on another device. That'll show a short code they can enter on the original device to actually log in. It's not perfect, but it works.

I do fully agree that passwords should always be an option as well.

anotheryou• 2 years ago

get Mail on different device, copy link and send it to myself via some messenger, link preview uses up the login %)

pwdisswordfishz• 2 years ago

Anti-mobile. As mentioned by 404 in their own article, this breaks the ability to use in-app browsers, which is quite annoying especially for RSS reader type apps. It makes interacting with any local link in the RSS feed extremely annoying.

To be fair, in-app browsers should die, especially those without an "open in regular browser" opt-out – which RSS readers should readily offer anyway.

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

What is an RSS reader?

tzs4• 2 years ago

An RSS reader is the client software for reading RSS feeds. Here's a description of RSS feeds [1]. Here is a list of some readers [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators

pcthrowaway• 2 years ago

Seriously, this needs to be ended by the harshest penalty of law.

Throw every product manager responsible for forcing in-app browsers upon their users in jail.

withinboredom• 2 years ago

Let me tell you about the time Epic's magic links were delayed six hours. I couldn't login to fortnite. It was absolutely tragic. /s

j16sdiz• 2 years ago

Usability issue aside. ... Using SMTP as the only login factor sounds very insecure to me.

victorbjorklund2• 2 years ago

I really hate magic links. Only time I think they could be acceptable is if it is an app where you just log in once or maybe once every couple of years.

buro9• 2 years ago

The article doesn't even touch "people enter their email incorrectly when registering an account".

I've received magic links to my Gmail account that belong to other people, for accounts that have ordered flight tickets, or clothing, or digital services.

Those people, I guess they now have no way to access their online account, as they cannot password reset (if that was the fallback), or change their email (usually requiring confirmation), or receive their magic link.

There's nothing I can do here, except to delete the email, I don't have any indication as to what the correct email should be, and the person's name is the same as my legal name and there are a lot of people with that name in the World.

Few services verify an email during sign-up, because I'm sure data shows that added friction during sign-up results in fewer people signing up.

denismi• 2 years ago

This happens on my Gmail all the time.

Frankly, if somebody else uses my address for a service and I'm receiving anything other than email verification from that service, I'm reporting it as spam on both Gmail and Fastmail because that's what it is.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

You're right, I forgot to even cover that part because I was focused on how annoying they are to me as a user, not necessarily as a service provider. I also forgot to mention how they train people to click on links, how my inbox now consists of dozens of emails per day telling me to either click to login, or warning me that I logged in.

I have my own domains for email so I haven't had the issue of someone else entering my email but I keep hearing from friends getting that.

m4tthumphrey• 2 years ago

Good post. I chose to only implement magic links in a previous project and had an issue with users complaining that the (one-time) link would always be expired when they clicked. I could not reproduce it and just left it. Then this thread appeared and I instantly knew the problem: email client previews. Lesson learnt.

jvanderbot• 2 years ago

I have a very personal reason to hate magic links:

I'm quite fast at passwords and 2fa. The whole thing is second nature, I have a password scheme to deduce the password for any site but keep them long and high entropy, and I can do 2fa calculations from any trusted device without taking my hands off the keyboard (thanks to oathtool), and anyway my passwords are sync'd securely and I can look them up with hands on keyboard.

This is strictly better than "single point of email failure". Why force me to be less secure and less usable.

Please, just allow me to use passwords and regular old TOTP.

littlestymaar3• 2 years ago

While I agree with most he says, I really don't get why people would push for passkeys like this, it's probably the worse system in existence in terms of UX (as the more likely to get you locked-out of your account) while providing minimal security benefits (the account recovery mechanism is the weakest link in the chain, and as such it's not any better than magic links). The only ones benefiting from passkeys are Google and Apple (and app/website owners who can't avoid mismanaging user passwords, but they have little stake in this game anyway).

methou• 2 years ago

I hate those tragic links, some of them were sent from third party and infested with tracking links. Worse, it looks like from the site I'm logging in to, but the href is a tracker with redirection to the actual link. I see this frequently because my dns blocks those trackers.

openplatypus• 2 years ago

404Media article about Magic Links: https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/

Our response to above: https://wideangle.co/blog/passwordless-authentication-magic-...

Conclusions:

Magic Links good? Yes.

Magic Links the best? No.

WaitWaitWha5• 2 years ago

Just a pet peeve with passkeys (and other authN) that presses users towards biometrics -

In the US, because the Fifth Amendment Self-Incrimination Clause, passwords cannot be demanded. Passwords are testimonial evidence. [United States v. Hubbell (2000); re Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum (11th Cir. 2012)]

Biometrics on the other hand are not. The court ruled that a defendant could be compelled to unlock a phone with biometrics because it is not testimonial. [Commonwealth v. Baust (Virginia, 2014); State v. Diamond (Minnesota, 2017)]

Basically, passwords cannot be compelled to be disclosed, while biometrics can.

There is similar legal stance in Canada, UK, Australia, India, Germany, and Brazil to name a few.

Finally, under duress, passwords can be held, while biometrics cannot, without self harm.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

What I'd recommend is if you're worried about this (or worried about it in certain instances), disable biometrics to unlock the device itself. Then, passkeys on it don't really matter anymore.

WaitWaitWha5• 2 years ago

This works if the event, which forces unlock, is expected. Often such events are not expected and there are but seconds.

beala• 2 years ago

On iPhone, you can quickly do this by holding down the lock button and either volume button until the shutdown screen appears. Once it appears, your phone is now locked and it will only accept the PIN (you don't need to actually shut down).

frantathefranta• 2 years ago

Would you happen to know what the rule is on Yubikeys and the like? I assume if it's PIN-protected, it counts as a password but what if it's just set up for tap-to-unlock?

WaitWaitWha5• 2 years ago

Not a lawyer and do not know your jurisdiction.

I extrapolated this as anything that is in the mind (PIN, password, some secret) cannot be demanded, while anything outside of the mind, biometrics, geolocation, physical object (key) can.

Again, I am just a hairless monkey smashing rocks together. Consult experts.

mminer237• 2 years ago

Of course they can use that. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to not testify against yourself. You can keep silent. That's it about self-incrimination. The government can seize any physical object and do essentially anything it wants with it with a warrant. They can physically decap a TPM and read the security key if they really want to.

hazmazlaz• 2 years ago

I agree, and I wish there was an option to always require both a passcode/password AND biometrics in iOS and MacOS. While it would become a hassle having to do it every time, it would at least guarantee that one could retain their 5th Amendment rights if the device were seized.

circuit10• 2 years ago

Having no backup to biometrics could lock you out permanently if it stops recognising you for some reason, so it would need to accept just the password, and at that point you can just turn biometrics off entirely

philipwhiuk3• 2 years ago

There is similar legal stance in Canada, UK, Australia, India, Germany, and Brazil to name a few.

There is not a similar stance in the UK. You can be compelled to provide a password. Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 200 (RIPA and let that doublespeak sink in a second) allows the police to compel it subject to a warrant from a judge.

The sentence (subject to sentencing guidelines) is up to two years in prison or 5 years for national security / child indecency cases.

You can claim you don't remember/know it as a defence, but in most cases that's not going to be believed by a jury.

In theory once you got out you could be re-served with the notice and face another 2-5 years. Rinse and repeat.

hiatus• 2 years ago

In theory once you got out you could be re-served with the notice and face another 2-5 years. Rinse and repeat.

Is there no concept of double-jeopardy in UK jurisprudence?

BoxOfRain• 2 years ago

What happens in the case of plausibly-deniable keys? Say someone has an encrypted drive with a hidden volume, one key decrypts decoy files and one decrypts the true files. If the person gives up the key to the decoy files, is the onus on the prosecution to prove additional keys exist or on the defence to prove they don't?

moffkalast• 2 years ago

The UK always surprises with how close their reality is to V for Vendetta.

xerox13ster• 2 years ago

There's no doublespeak there. To regulate just means to make regular. If they make the reprehensible the regular way of doing things then they've still done the job they're nominally supposed to do. They could say all investigations have broad sweeping powers going forward and they would still be regulating investigatory powers.

We want regulation to be for the benefit of all so we attach an emotional meaning to it but nothing about the word says it has to be beneficial.

SkyBelow• 2 years ago

but in most cases that's not going to be believed by a jury.

Is there are least some argument of reasonability? I have an old Runescape account I would love to be able to get back into, but I don't even remember the email it was tied to, much less the password. I was a kid back then so even the card that paid for membership was my parents. Is there some expectation that the prosecutor has to show the account was accessed in the last X years, or is this effectively a backdoor to keep someone in prison indefinitely?

injidup• 2 years ago

Biometrics then need a mix of non-testimonal and testimonial input. ie it only unlocks when it sees it is your face and your face blowing a rasberry. Can you be compelled to blow a raspberry?

HWR_142• 2 years ago

In the US, the answer would be yes you can be compelled to blow a raspberry.

brightball• 2 years ago

I've always thought of passkeys as a good 2nd factor in conjunction with a password. Similar to the way you'd use a Yubikey or anything else with FIDO2/WebAuthn.

Seeing passkeys as a dedicated login on their own is...strange. For all of the reasons that you indicate.

joncrocks• 2 years ago

There is similar legal stance in Canada, UK, Australia, India, Germany, and Brazil to name a few.

In the UK the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) makes it a criminal offence to not divulge a password if compelled via a RIPA notice.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/section/53

joering2• 2 years ago

I wonder what would happened if you willingly keep providing a wrong password. The possibility of your device malfunctioning IS and always will be > 0.

Can the judge really throw you, and re-throw you multiple times to jail because the password you keep providing did not work?

jesseendahl2• 2 years ago

You can’t unlock your iPhone with biometrics at first boot, and holding down the two side buttons will make it so your phone immediately disables biometric unlock, and instead requires your passcode for the next unlock.

But none of this has much to do with the biometric auth you do with passkeys, because passkeys are used in places passwords would be used — logging into apps and websites. Which you see only doing when your device is already unlocked and you are actively using it.

hirvi74• 2 years ago

You can also quickly press the lock button 5 times and then your iPhone won't unlock with Face ID until a passcode is entered.

latexr• 2 years ago

holding down the two side buttons will make it so your phone immediately disables biometric unlock

Also pressing the lock button five times in a row.

WaitWaitWha5• 2 years ago

Thank you for the correction on the UK laws.

Kwpolska• 2 years ago

I agree with magic links being bad, but passkeys aren't the right solution for multiple devices either, because it requires sharing the account or password manager they're saved in between devices, and I'd rather keep my private accounts and passwords away from work devices. With plain old passwords, I can open my password manager on a trusted device and type the password into an untrusted one.

cratermoon• 2 years ago

From a .zip domain. Irony.

gepeto4217• 2 years ago

Thanks for recognizing it, it was absolutely by design!

shortformblog• 2 years ago

Feel like the solution to this problem is probably to offer an app that turns magic links into notifications. As well as to probably untether the magic link from the cookie in the browser, so that you are not required to hit the magic link in the same browser that you called the link from.

albert_e2• 2 years ago

Virtually all online streaming services in India now use a OTP sent to registered mobile number as the way to login to the app on any device.

Magic links and OTPs have become common for many other sites I use -- Udemy, Teachable etc. come to mind.

Recently I bought a cheap "smart watch" for my kid. Mostly for the digital display with configurable clock faces and simple step counting. The app would refuse to activate the watch unless we provide a valid mobile number and OTP. Why the hell do I need to give them a working mobile number just to use a smartwatch. Even if I wanted (which I did not) to get notifications / calls / texts / caller ID / contacts from my paired smartphone ... the smartwatch app does not need to know my phone number for that functionality to work. Feel so powerless.

chrisweekly• 2 years ago

I hate magic links. Being forced to switch applications to wait and hope an email will eventually arrive is a fundamentally bad experience.

technick• 2 years ago

Magic links are a easy way to move the responsibility of security off to the user and remove the risk of managing access controls.

Saris• 2 years ago

Magic links are one of the worst things ever introduced on the internet. They're slow, painful, and just such a dumb idea.

Magic/tragic email links: don't make them the only option

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