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Comment by xorcist

The big drawback of one time passwords is that it doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks such as phishing, which is in practice one of the most common attacks on systems of this scale.

The logistics operation involved in distributing codes is also very expensive and inflexible. You may need to authenticate payments a dozen times in an hour one day, when you are on a farmers market which doesn't take card payments or you are out dining with friends, and another day not at all.

Given all this, a good old public key infrastructure makes sense. But that is unfortunately also usually the first step to a complexity explosion.

parent xorcist 8 months ago

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