As a game designer, I would prefer my security be maintained through an elaborate series of puzzles.

“Allow me to introduce myself.”

~ Three Factor Authentication

I don’t think that the problem is 2FA itself so much as poor UX on existing systems.

Let’s say that I have a little USB keychain dongle in my pocket with an “approve” button and a tiny screen. When I sign in, at the time that I plug my password in, I plug the dongle in. It shows the information for whom I am approving authentication. I push the “approve” button.

It’s got a trusted display (unlike a smartcard, so that a point-of-sale system can’t claim that I’m approving something other than what I am).

It can store multiple keys, and I basically use it for any credentials that I don’t mind carrying with myself.

I then keep another, “higher security” dongle at home with more-sensitive keys.

Does that add some overhead relative to just entering my password? Yeah. But is it a big deal? No. And it makes it a lot harder for someone to swipe credentials.

I agree that using phone-linked SMS 2FA authentication is problematic (for a number of reasons, not just because it locks you to a phone, but because there are also privacy implications there).

I don’t mind the extra layer of security, and actually prefer it. The only exception is when the site/service only allows SMS or email delivery, and won’t let me use an auth app.

The hassle and delay is part of how it works. If there was a seamless catch all then it wouldn’t be feasible to make it secure.

Having a second physical factor, as much as it can be a hassle, is much better than any single factor.

Your password can be breached, brute forced, bypassed if there’s an issue somewhere.

Your biometrics can’t be changed so anything that breaks them (such as the breach of finger prints in databases, etc) makes them moot.

A single physical token can be stolen and/or potentially cloned by some attack in physical proximity (or breach of an upstream certificate authority)

But doing multiple of those at the same time. That’s inordinately much harder to do.

I will say the point/gist of the article is a good one. The variety of types some used here and others used there does make it a hassle to try to wrangle all the various accounts/logins. Especially in their corporate and managed deployment which isn’t saving passwords and has a explicit expiration of credential cache (all good things)

This is a pretty terrible take… if you take just a little bit of time to set up a password manager and use the browser plugin it is all just one password away. I actively seek out additional 2FA because it’s just simple and seamless, where my password manager will put the TOTP code on my clipboard ready to paste, or it’ll automatically pop up when the site asks for a passkey (like Google, referenced in the article).

Just sounds like this dude is whining about a problem that he doesn’t want to solve for himself.