My concern against using FB for authentication is this: Does using FB login 
give the site read access to my profile, friends, etc? My profile is set to 
private to keep advertisers at bay. In the early years Facebook warned users 
that clicking on an external link would grant such access.

matthew


-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of 
valdis.kletni...@vt.edu
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 1:12 PM
To: Keith Medcalf
Cc: nanog@nanog.org; Brian Ladd
Subject: Re: [outages] facebook slow

On Fri, 30 Nov 2018 13:16:31 -0700, "Keith Medcalf" said:
> Why don't you just write all your password on big sheets of 
> construction paper and put them on the front of the building or in the 
> nearest Starbucks?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that with all the problems inherent in 
using a social media account as an authenticator, for 95% of sites it's still 
more secure than if they attempted to create their own authentication system.
Having even less security expertise than Facebook, they will probably get wrong 
(possibly in a subtle fashion that gets quietly exploited for years, and 
possibly in a spectacular fashion that makes it on the evening news).

There's the additional factor that security is always about trade-offs - for 
many sites, the dangers of using social media logins are *far* outweighed by 
being able to just have a big shiny "Log in using Facebook" button instead of 
making the user set up an account, pick a password, send them a verification 
e-mail, then they have to read their e-mail and click on the link.  Do that, 
and they just left for another site.  Doesn't take many people leaving for 
another site before any added "security" added by doing authentication yourself 
is outweighed by lost traffic.


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