Comment by AnthonyMouse
3 hours ago
There is a simple and highly accurate heuristic to tell if a security measure is reasonable:
Is it an open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement?
When the answer is yes, there is a high probability that it's something reasonable, e.g. TOTP.
When the answer is no, what you will find behind the curtain is either a fool or a crook.
This heuristic is not covering the dimensions of interest here, because it fails to address the key security questions (that the industry usually wants people to not even think about):
Who is doing the securing, whose interests are being secured, and against who/what?
Security isn't an unqualified good thing to have. It's just an instrument of control. Who wields it and how are the paramount questions. You can have an "open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement", aimed at protecting interest of third parties, by securing the device from its actual owner. In fact, that describes many, if not most, security measures introduced in computing over the past 20 years, especially on the web and mobile devices.
Right, and that leads us back to the more-generalized (but very classic) cui bono? Who gets the benefits?