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While mitigating a number of attacks, MFA with these types of physical tokens is still only as strong as their setup/enrollment process, which in many cases can be compromised via phishing.

From my experience, there’s a difference between trying to compromise someone with good opsec (many readers of hacker news) and compromising regular non technical people




How are you envisioning practically attacking deployment of FIDO tokens via phishing? Compared to conventional phishing or spear phishing attacks this seems very difficult to execute.

Suppose BigCorp users are supposed to enroll the new tokens they all received at mfa.bigcorp.example which I dunno maybe they're reaching via a link from blog.thebigcorp.example because of course these organisations have a dozen different domains used interchangeably.

I can see how you could try to redirect some or all employees to mfa.b1gc0rp.example which you control, and that's an opportunity to steal their non-token credentials, but now their token doesn't actually work.

Even though they've enrolled with mfa.b1gc0rp.example you don't directly gain working token credentials for bigcorp.example this way, and almost as importantly for this attack, nor do they. So they're going to call the company IT desk.

I guess if you own a suitable token, you could conduct this as a spear phishing attack where the victim tries to enroll at your bogus site, then you replay the non-token credentials they used for that to enroll your real token on the real site, but again the victim doesn't end up with a working token, so it seems like you're up against the clock.

And while during the pandemic I'm sure new employees were routinely enrolled off-campus, I suspect that's just not the case in normal times, even at organisations which have a very broad work-from-home policy.


I was specifically thinking banking and it’s exactly this type of spear phishing attack that happens (although with other types of tokens the Fido). In these scenarios, you only need to move the money once.

You definitely have a point with regard to non-transaction usage that requires long term access


Most MFA solutions are vulnerable to attack because there is a real challenge handling enrollment and lost tokens. It requires verification of the user, which guess what? Hard to do especially with remote users.


This is true, and the goal of Security Awareness Training is to resolve this problem. I’m a huge believer in it.




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