Dropbox Adds Two-Factor Authentication 64
angry tapir writes "File-sharing service Dropbox is now offering two-factor authentication, a system that makes it much harder for hackers to capture valid credentials for a person's account. Dropbox, one of the most widely used web-based storage services, said last month it planned on introducing two-factor authentication after user names and passwords were stolen from another website and used to access accounts."
Re:More Security for My Cat Pictures! (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a lot of data people need to sync and share that is confidential enough that you don't really want it to leak out, but still not that secret that it's the end of the world if it does. You know, the kind of data you would be perfectly comfortable letting a reasonably big and relatively trustworthy service manage for you.
And if that service gets even more secure, you can rest easy knowing that if the data does leak out, it's not because you where careless with your passwords, and thus you have someone else to blame.
By now Dropbox have a proven track record of security and reliability. Yes, it was apparent that they themselves could get at the data if they needed, but I fail to see how it would work otherwise. At least with this, you can be somewhat safer knowing that it would take more than hack your account at some other, less secure service, to get at the data, just because you like to reuse passwords.
Can OpenID-like tech rise again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Back when OpenID was popular the argument was that you can outsource your authentication to a service that actually has a clue about security. Back then, though, none of the popular identity providers actually did anything better than username/password. (With the exception of MyOpenID, but they were always kinda niche.)
Now that I've embraced Google's two-factor auth -- accepting a little inconvenience for a little more security -- I find it useful that when I log into Google properties I only need to do the two-factor stuff once in a while, rather than for every single service. Two-factor auth *is* less convenient, but if you have single sign-on then you can make it less so.
If the latest trend is for every service to implement its *own* two-factor auth then this is going to get much less convenient. I'd sooner see services like DropBox just integrate with Google's auth (and with anyone else who has a decent auth system) and let users benefit.
Re:Can OpenID-like tech rise again? (Score:4, Insightful)
They do. You can use Google's Authenticator mobile app to authenticate yourself with Dropbox.