What is your first factor?

I like to think of myself as a security aware person. I use a password manager for all of my services, encrypt my hard drives, enable 2FA where ever I can. Heck, I even put this website on the HSTS preload list.1 Recently, I built a little tool that generates 2FA (one-time password) codes from the command line. Partly to learn more about how they work, partly because I find it annoying to have to grab for my phone every time I want to log in to a service.

A common reaction I got from several people was “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of two-factor authentication?” I feel like that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of two-factor authentication. Allow me to explain.

Factors of authentication

Authentication —that is, verifying your identity— can be done in a variety of ways, many of which I’m sure you use on a daily basis. We all log in to most of our accounts using passwords. Maybe you’ve had to show your ID when opening a bank account. Or maybe you unlock your phone using a biometric verification like a fingerprint scanner or facial recognition. Famously, methods of authentication are clustered in three broad categories:

  1. Something you know
  2. Something you have
  3. Something you are

The first one of these are things like passwords or —if you’re still living in the ’90s— some arbitrary “security question”. You know, the classic “What is your mother’s maiden name?”

The second one can be something like a passport, an SSH key, or bank card.

The last one, which has become much more dominant these last few years now that biometrics have become more pervasive and reliable, includes things like fingerprint scanners and voice/facial recognition. An interesting property of these methods that sets them apart from the other two categories, is that they are impossible to revoke or update2. If my password is leaked or I lose my credit card, it’s easy enough to revoke and change them out. It’s not like I can ever change my fingerprint or voice. That can actually have serious security implications.

It should be clear that using any of these methods as a means for proving your identity entirely hinges on your having exclusive access to them. If someone else knows your password, steals your passport or fingerprint, they’ll have little problems posturing as you with whichever service the particular credential was for.

But what if you don’t have exclusive access to these credentials? How do you protect against your password getting leaked, or you losing your passport? The obvious, rather inelegant, solution is to just keep adding extra authentication layers. Instead of just needing to know your password, maybe now they ask for your password and your security question. Or your phone pin and a fingerprint scan. This is typically called “security in depth”. Instead of needing to break one mechanism, now an offender needs to break two, three, or however many you’ve set up. This is what multi-factor authentication (MFA) is.

In fact, you might have noticed that many of the examples I gave above aren’t just “single factor”. Many of them are, to some extent, MFA: Even if you get hold of my bank card, it’s useless if you don’t also have my PIN (which, presumably, only I know). My passport comes with a picture, so unless you look somewhat like me, you’ll be found out rather quickly. Arguably, these are very flawed MFA mechanisms, but they are MFA, nonetheless.

Your first factor

Which brings us back to the original question: does generating your 2FA codes on your laptop defeat the purpose of 2FA? Well, let’s think about what the two factors in the typical 2FA scheme are.

The first, almost invariably, is your password. Whether that’s a password you’ve memorized, or stashed away in a password manager (whose password, hopefully, you do have memorized), doesn’t fundamentally make a difference. It sits squarely in the something you know column.

The second factor3 is essentially the shared secret token you recieved from the service in question. This was most likely a Base32-encoded string, or a QR code thereof that you scanned with your phone. That token is used to generate those 6-digit codes, based on the timestamp when it was generated. The server has access to the same token (since they generated it) and the timestamp, so validating your 6 digit code is as simple as generating a code on the server and checking whether they are the same.

The second factor, then, is something you have: the shared secret token.4 Whether this token is stored on my laptop, or on my phone, does not change the character of the credential. Whether that token is protected behind an additional passphrase on my computer, or behind a fingerprint scan on my phone, adds additional security (again, security in depth), but does not change the fact that the password is the first factor, the token is the second.

The confusion comes from the fact that many people think your computer is the first factor of authentication. But, I cannot stress this enough: it is in fact your password. The confusion probably stems from the fact that…

It’s all one-factor anyway

There is, of course, the elephant in the room that should not go unmentioned. However much we like to set up 2FA on all our services, at the end of the day, most of us still authenticate through a single factor, something we have: our session cookies. If anyone gets a hold of my computer, the game is up for much more obvious reasons than “they might get a hold of my 2FA secret”. They’ll simply have access to all of my currently logged in sessions. It makes no difference whether you dilligently use a different password for every service.

Maybe that’s another reason I give particularly little heed to the claim that “having your tokens live on your computer defeats the point”. Two factor authentication cannot and was never meant to protect against people getting hold of your computer. It’s meant to protect against people getting hold of your password.

Footnotes

  1. HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) is an HTTP header that tells the browser to always upgrade the connection to HTTPS in the future. This is cool, but it still leaves the very first visit open to man-in-the-middle attacks. Browsers ship with a pre-defined lists of domains, the so-called HSTS preload list, such that even that very first visit will be forced to go over HTTPS. Clearly, this is completely overkill for a static content website such as this one, and we can hardly expect to ship every single domain on the internet with the binary. I wrote more about HSTS and the attacks it’s meant to prevent in a previous post.

  2. Save, perhaps, through Hollywood-esque surgical means.

  3. For the purposes of this article, I will consider 6-digit TOTP codes, like the ones generated through Authy or Google Authenticator.

  4. That is, of course, unless you’ve memorized the token and are generating your OTP codes on the fly. In which case, good for you.