Comment by devy
15 hours ago
I can't believe promoting the QR code-based challenge as the agentic way of fraud defense. Having non-human readable data input is dangerous if somehow the QR code is comprised with a zero-day URL, it's game-over.
Note: I know QR code is ubiquitous these days, but still blinding scanning a QR code to go to accessing an URL is like running a binary downloaded from the internet.
Note2: yes, the `curl $URL | bash` installation approach is essentially just that, yet somehow became popular.
But a QR is a URL. If visiting a certain URL pwns your device, complain to whoever made the device or browser.
Not that I like this thing at all. But using a QR isn’t exactly why it sucks.
It's a URL that you can't read. It's literally exactly what we tell people to not do to be secure. LOOK AT THE FUCKING URL BEFORE YOU VISIT THE SITE.
No, we don't, or shouldn't ask people to check the URL itself, because of homonym attacks are a thing. Goal is to make sure that your credentials can't be compromised by surfing the wrong website (e.g. by using Passkeys instead of passwords).
Right! Let me check the URL before clicking the "confirm your account" link!
https://rt434.mjt.lu/lnk/GN2PVLyAIiUHuMqkGcjHkjkcRBtF/zJfB7p...
Oh wait, never mind. I guess I won't be signing up for electricity, then?
Also, the vast majority of people don't know that google.com and loginto-google.com aren't the same website, or that google.com.securesigning.net isn't real Google.
If your device gets busted by opening a URL, without any further confirmation or user interaction, your browser/camera app/third party app is broken.
Whoever told you that is the same person that advocated complex password rules with montly resets and no repeats.
2020s will be remembered as the decade when companies stopped behaving in a trustworthy way, and normalized scanning random QR codes, downloading random apps, uploading photos of your face or documents, all as strange convoluted "verification" procedures. Scammers will love this
Companies were doing this all along. The 2020s will be remembered as the decade when we realized, too late, that the world began ending in the 2010s.
Unregulated greed doesn't care if every user gets robbed and their identity stolen.
Whats to stop malicious actors (bad extensions, compromised cdn, etc.) from painting over the qr code or injecting their own? This is so incredibly terrible.
Doesn't have to even be that advanced, people get conditioned to stuff like reCAPTCHA and friends & Cloudflare's interstitial landing page (when "I'm under attack" mode is on) and they won't bat an eye. That's how we get people piping `curl | bash` into their terminal to "solve" fake challenges.
As a side note though, I recently have tried to turn CSP on a website I run and the amount of garbage I see in the reports is astonishing. There's some noise from things like OpenDNS intercepting YouTube or Social embeds for people using the work-friendly or family-friendly options, but the sheer amount of things attempting to phone home to random URLs and random extension scripts injecting ads into the site would astonish you. My mental model of "toolbar hell" from the Windows XP days being gone has completely shattered.