Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing
Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity.
Security Keys are inexpensive USB-based devices that offer an alternative approach to two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires the user to log in to a Web site using something they know (the password) and something they have (e.g., a mobile device).
A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google.
"We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google," the spokesperson said. "Users might be asked to authenticate using their security key for many different apps/reasons. It all depends on the sensitivity of the app and the risk of the user at that point in time."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 24 2018, @01:29PM (3 children)
I recently got a Yubikey (from Ars) to play around with. I've not looked into how the thing actually works, but purely from a user perspective, there seems to be a problem with browser dependencies, or perhaps browser version dependencies. I often have to switch browsers to get into a particular site. I've been too lazy to document exactly what works, and what doesn't, but there's really no reason for any vaguely recent, mainstream browser not to work.
This is something that seems to crop up more and more lately: websites that work differently, or not at all, with particular browsers. Reminds me of the bad-old-days with IE6...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday July 24 2018, @02:02PM
In general, UN*X has had OTP for decades, so TFA is simply an extension.
"RSA Key" has been around a good while - they got hacked once, though I'm not sure how much that affected them.
Yubikey is probably as good as you can get on the domestic market.
I believe YK works via the keyboard input - well behaved on Linux, MacOsx.
I know nothing about Winsoze....
Anybody else?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:14PM (1 child)
I as going to point out the hypocrisy with Google here, they're using hardware keys, but they purposefully prevent Firefox from accessing Gmail via a yubikey even though they support it on Chrome and Firefox supports Yubikey out of the box.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:58AM
Firefox doesn't support Yubikey though, or more specifically, Firefox does not implement full support for U2F, the open protocol that Gmail requires.
See the four year old bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065729 [mozilla.org]
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