Feds Warn SMS Authentication Is Unsafe After ‘Worst Hack in Our Nation’s History’
Even the U.S. government is telling Americans to use encrypted apps.
@return2ozma @technology
10 years ago, the Feds wanted backdoors to all of phones so they could read all of our text messages. Now, the Feds want everyone not to use software that has backdoors so the Chinese cannot read our phones. The Feds don't want competition.
The backdoors they use are there for freedom and justice, the backdoors the "others" use are tools of evil and security risks!
Absolutely. They were so arrogant they never thought it would happen to us. After all, we are in charge of our own networks so why would we expect the enemy to be at the gates? Let's make those gates out of cardboard so it's easier to spy on everyone.
Of course then you have things like CALEA mandating a back door, you have cheap telecom companies that will happily buy cheap lowest bidder Chinese hardware and install it "everywhere* without concern for security (after all, it's not their data being stolen) and now the enemy isn't just at the gates but inside the walls.
A decade ago, making sure the feds could read everyone's mail was the national security priority. Suddenly when the Chinese can read everyone's mail, good security is the national security priority.
It's too bad there was no way to predict this in advance. Oh wait...
Why the hell is this in 4K HDR?
Only the best for the worst hack in history.
We here at Lemmy are professionals
NIST has been saying since 2016 not to use SMS for MFA. It's always been horribly insecure.
The problem for me is that most Canadian Banks give you the choice of SMS or their shitty adware filled bank app that relies on Google Play Services and wont implement TOTP so I can use a true MFA app. And Im done with being forced to accept user policies I don't agree with to do shit, and most of all done with Google Play Services on my device 😑
Adding to this that my Canadian bank just updated their app and it doesn't work with my older phone. So my only option is to use online services with SMS/call verification.
It's such a joy to know that my bank, who made $40.670 billion last year, takes care of every customer equally.
This is the main reason I switched to Fidelity here in the US. It's a brokerage, but it does basic bank things, like checks, debit card, etc, and they support SymantecVIP, which works w/o Google Play Services. TOTP support really isn't that hard, I don't understand why banks are so slow in adopting it...
My bank prides itself being the first in the country to support yubikeys for 2fa. I was so happy until i learned it's just for logging in, transactions are still confirmed by SMS or their app. And security experts all say it's better this way, using a regular 2fa solution would be insecure because you wouldn't know what you're confirming.
There really is no hope.
Oh man it sure would be nice if the feds had the power to regulate something like this /s
They did. That's the reason for this hack, they wanted Lawful Interception, they got their backdoor. It's what professionals and privacy advocates said all along, if it exists it will be abused.
This isn’t a hack in the way you’re thinking of, nor is it a product of government mandated interception, or a back door. The salt typhoon event you’re referring to is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger problem, which is abuse of the dated SS7 system we’ve known about for decades.
Been saying that for years. It's about damn time.
SMS spoofing and SIM swapping have been around for ages. It was never secure and that's always been known. The number of companies that rely on it despite sending me a zillion other fucking useless emails is too damn high! Email, or better yet, an authenticator app, are far more secure. Not perfect, but better.
Oh it turns out we needed NSA to do its actual fucking job after all rather than holding onto exploits for the surveillance state.
Now — for the second time — we have an adversarial administration eager to weaponize government departments while Americans are vulnerable. Why? Because America is the good guys and would never abuse its extrajudicial powers (say, by detaining, rendering and torturing Americans with names similar to those of POIs.)
We could have had twenty-four years of robust communications security developments if NSA didnt sell the public out like Judas.
rendering
Wait, are they melting people down to make soap now? Fight Club wasn't just a meme then...
I hate forced 2FA that you can't disable anyway. I don't want to waste time waiting for an insecure text, I don't want to input an unencrypted code you sent to my email, I don't want to click your damn notification that runs through Play Services, and no I'm not enrolling in passwordless auth. I don't need to be babied into securing my accounts. Any account I do actively and willingly secure is already using TOTP. Let me put in my username and password, then kindly fuck off.
Yeah. So you, myself, and some others are the exception to the rule. But, you can't look at it that way because its a 'lowest common denominator' problem. The least secure of us means we are all only as secure. Others need to be hand held.
It's definitely time to raise all boats and drop SMS 2fa like a hot rock.
The most natural authentication mechanism for humans is a key. That thing you carry with yourself. A physical key containing, well, the actual secret (shouldn't be retrievable, should be used for decrypting access request and signing the response) that, maybe combined with your password (another natural for humans authentication mechanism) or maybe, yes, TOTP, gives you access.
Like those "security keys" Imperial officers in Jedi Outcast carry with them. Maybe a bad example.
Phone numbers are used as identifiers because governments like it, nerds don't like it, and normies explicitly like what nerds don't like and also want everything to be insecure, they call it "having nothing to hide".
Also "normal and social" people have that idea that their social prowess is more elegant, smarter at ensuring their security that those dumb and boring nerd technical solutions. So them always choosing things logically opposite of sane, like social media instead of forums, and phone numbers instead of any other identifier, is literally a matter of principle. It's really not that hard to use something else. They do the stupidest possible thing technically to prove a point that you only have to do the smart thing socially. I mean, in Galileo Galilei's case the other side of the disagreement is generally considered right, but that's not an argument effective in society.
I should admit that I've been doing the opposite - the stupidest possible thing socially to prove a point that only technical sense matters, which is why nobody would send me encrypted mail except Facebook with its notifications, and nobody would write me in Tox, and nobody would even contact me via XMMP. Which is why I'm now using TG, VK, FB, WA and Signal for communication, of these Signal is secure, and WA is kinda better than the rest of them.
You can apply this logic to nearly anything with very bad consequences.
is already using TOTP.
A lot of things are moving to phishing-resistant technologies like FIDO2/WebAuthn or passkeys. All my important accounts, like my password manager, are secured using Yubikeys (one that I keep with me and one as a backup in a secure place).
in other news grass is green
It's brown in my area. Check mate!
Yes mate! I checked mate, you're right mate!
actually it's white
Always has been
Didn't this happen quite awhile ago? I don't see anything new in this article
The novelty is the fact that it's ongoing. They haven't mitigated the hack. The threat actors are still inside the networks, which is why the government is telling people to switch to E2EE apps.
Lovely
Thank god, give me my HMAC hash please.
Nothing more terrifying than losing your phone number these days because of all the accounts tied to it via 2FA.
Authentication for my work email: Enter 28 character password, receive sms, enter message, log in
Authentication for my Battle.net account:
-Enter email made before 2000 because they don't let you change email
-Enter password
-Get rejected
-Solve CAPTCHA
-Try backup passwords, get rejected
-Request new password
-Send request to 24 year old email
-Try to log on to 24 year old email, email is suspicious and sends Authentication request to my newer email
-Open newer email, Authenticate older email
-open old email, Put in code to battle.net
-Battle.net requests Authenticator code from Battle.net app
-Open battle.net app (no requests)
-Try manual code, doesn't work
-Try to connect Battle.net app Authenticator to account
-Realize you cannot connect Authenticator without signing in AND signing in requires Authenticator
-Close Battle.net app
-Open Blizzard Authenticator
-Close warning that this app got depreciated in January
-Enter manual code
-it works
-Attempt to change password to password I first attempted
-Won't let me use same password
-Try logging in using that password
-Still doesn't work - Solve one more CAPTCHA
-Change password to backup password and back to original password - have to solve 2 more Captchas
-Finally works
-Log in
of course it is. forced 2fa BY SMS OF ALL THINGS is one of the stupidest ideas
I assume businesses only jumped at the chance to enable SMS 2FA to get their greedy little fingers on our phone numbers.
It was the simplest/cheapest form of 2FA to implement. Grandma will never understand how to setup TOTP.
Capitalism requires regulations, otherwise it will ALWAYS do what is cheapest or most profitable, regardless of how dangerous or destructive.
Even stupider is supporting hardware keys for MFA, but having SMS fallback which can't be disabled (looking at you, Vanguard). I'd much rather have email as my second factor than SMS, and I literally abandoned a bank (Ally) for removing email as an alternative to SMS.
The end of an era.
Or actually, probably not until we redo whole cellular phone technology works and kick out all the bad actors using SS7 vulnerabilities for stuff like spoofing numbers and stealing messages. We really shouldn't be using a 45 year old system for almost all communications.
In their defense, they JUST applied an update in March 1993, so they're knocking on the doors of cutting edge technology updates -_-
Edit: added link
I wish Signal stopped using it. I know you can set a Signal PIN but a lot of the non-techy friends I speak to on Signal probably wouldn't think to, or look through the settings (not that you need to be "techy" to set it, but you know the kind of learned helplessness most people have about tech). At least a prompt for all users to set an account PIN so their account can't just be stolen by anyone with their SIM card.
Another thing is that even if you set a PIN, you'd still have to log into your account relatively regularly so that if you lose access to your number, you wouldn't lose an account. It's logical, given that numbers are reused... But that means that if you want to register without effectively tying your account to your ID (KYC when buying numbers is mandatory in a lot of the world, remember!), you'd have to pay for another phone bill (expensive given that the number's practically doing nothing!) or use a one-time rental... Which guess what, puts your account at constant risk!
Since when was sms ever secure? My understanding is that messages are sent in the clear, meaning your carrier and the recipient's carrier both have the opportunity to intercept messages.
I mean that's the message content, not the authentication, but still, sms is the opposite of secure, always has been.
Not true. SMS is encrypted in 3G, LTE, 5G. Block cyphers like Kasumi and A/9 are used. SMS is reasonably secure, because it's hard to infiltrate telecom systems like S7
it's hard to infiltrate telecom systems like S7
Telecom systems can be (and are) infiltrated though, which is what the FBI is warning about.
SS7 is very insecure. See this video, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyu7NB7W6Y
Hollywood hacking has nothing on real hacking it seems.
'nuf said
New Clipper Chip mandatory in new phones for "security" 😉
Who's security, tho? 🤔
Security against foreign hackers, of course
(But with the additional purpose of securing the #LandOfTheFree against those pesky #Terrorists, of course. Who's a terrorist? Why of couse that's anyone who dares to criticize the government ahem I mean... make threats against the United States of America 🇺🇸🦅)
I coulda told you that for free. And sooner
id take email Authentication over sms Authentication if there was only them 2 let me use my 2facter app for the love of god plz i hate how banks use sms its like come on man
Email is also unencrypted
Ya just saying I don't like sms I wish email was encrypted maybe one day
I'm really happy that my doctor's website uses Signal to send the authentication code.
Incoming forced 4-factor authentication
Something you know, something you are, something you have, and something you saw in a dream once when you were a kid at summer camp during a feverish Dr Pepper-overdose-driven fitful sleep at age 12.
So many services still don't even offer 2FA at all. Any service that stores payment information and PII without any 2FA options, let alone a secure one, at this point are a disgrace.
Banks, I'm looking at you
I'm new to technology, is this good?
They will now push proprietary apps which steal your data, so you decide.
In a sane world we would move to yubikeys or codes like Google authenticator, but we live in a post sane technological world
TOTP or GTFO
Ive been slowly hearing about this over the last week or so, and I couldnt tell if it was real news or just over exaggerated.
And everyone has been on an on about iphone to android RCS, but no word on if anything is being done to fix the vulnerability.
What vulnerability? I thought RCS is encrypted on transit
RCS doesn't really do a whole lot of anything. It's a step up from SMS/MMS, but not by much.
All the features people think they mean when they're talking about RCS are proprietary Google extensions that only work if you go through Google's servers. They're basically exactly the same as Apple putting iMessage on top; Apple just brags about it while Google tries to trick you into thinking incompatibility is someone else's fault for not giving them control.