Technology

Google, Apple, and rest of big tech are pregnable despite their access to vast amounts of capital, and labor resources.

I used to be a big supporter of using their "social sign on" (or more generally speaking, single sign on) as a federated authentication mechanism. They have access to brilliant engineers thus naively thought - "well these companies are well funded, and security focused. What could go wrong having them handle a critical entry point for services?”

Well as this position continues to age poorly, many fucking aspects can go wrong!

1. These authentication services owned by big tech are much more attractive to attack. Finding that one vulnerability in their massive attack vector is difficult but not impossible.
2. If you use big tech to authenticate to services, you are now subject to the vague terms of service of big tech. Oh you forgot to pay Google store bill because card on file expired? Now your Google account is locked out and now lose access to hundreds of services that have no direct relation to Google/Apple
3. Using third party auth mechanisms like Google often complicate the relationship between service provider and consumer. Support costs increase because when a 80 yr old forgot password or 2FA method to Google account. They will go to the service provider instead of Google to fix it. Then you spend inordinate amounts of time/resources trying to fix issue. These costs eventually passed on to customer in some form or another

Which is why my new position is for federated authentication protocols. Similar to how Lemmy and the fediverse work but for authentication and authorization.

Having your own IdP won’t fix the 3rd issue, but at least it will alleviate 1st and 2nd concerns