"Tough luck, should have made a backup" is higher responsibility than securing anything in meatspace, including your passport or government ID. In the real world, there is always a recovery path. Security aficionados pushing non-recoverable traps on people are plain disconnected from reality.
Microsoft has the right approach here with Bitlocker defaults. It's not merely about UX - it's about not setting up traps and footguns that could easily cause harm to people.
Eventually they yielded on this, but their later updates had other usability traps. Because Google Auth was the household name for TOTP apps, this maybe ruined TOTP's reputation early-on.
Yes you should do the former. That doesn't say much about the latter.
Or maybe I missed something, and there is actually a way to download your phone backup from Google, or PC backup from Microsoft, as actual files you can browse, without having to have a sacrificial device to wipe and restore from backup?
That's the problem right there. Migrating my phone recently (without having broken/bricked the previous one, which is somehow even worse wrt. transferring 2FA these days than getting new phone after old one breaks!), I discovered that most sites I used did not allow more than one authenticator app. If I try to add new phone as second-factor auth method, the website deletes the entry for the old phone.
To be fair, if you inadvertently get locked out of your Google account "tough luck, should have used a different provider" and Gmail is a household name so ...
Less snarky, I think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with key escrow (either as a recovery avenue or otherwise) so long as it's opt in and the tradeoffs are made abundantly clear up front. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the route MS went.
I am sad that this now appears unlikely. I suspect it may even be lower for people in their 20s today than a decade ago.
One of these things is not like the other...
That's why I'm stressing the comparison to e.g. government documents: nothing in meatspace requires regular people to show anywhere near as much conscientiousness as handling encryption keys.
Or: many people probably know, in the abstract, that "encrypted means gone if you lose the key", much like many people know slipping up while working on a HV line will kill you. Doesn't mean we should require everyone to play with them.
Do you feel equally strongly about people using drives that can fail? Is selling a computer without redundant drives also borderline malicious?
> In the real world, there is always a recovery path.
To accounts there is. But data gets lost all the time.
No. Drives wear out and fail, like all hardware. Much like the compressor in your fridge, or V-belt in your car, you can extend the service life of your drive through proper care, and replace it when it fails to keep the system running. And in practice, hard drives are reliable enough that, with typical usage patterns, most people don't need RAID).
And, much like with fridges and cars, computers and their parts are subject to both market forces and (in more civilized places) consumer protection laws, which ensure computer hardware meets the usual, reasonable expectations of the common person.
> To accounts there is. But data gets lost all the time.
Data loss still happens, which kind of proves my point - computers are hard, and normal people can't even be expected to back things up properly. That's why every commercial PC and mobile OS vendor these days is pushing automated off-site backups using their cloud offerings. Might not be ideal, and even might be a tad anti-competitive, but it's a good deal for 99% of the users.
But this brings me back to my other pet peeve: 2FA, via authenticator apps, passkeys, and other such things that tie your credentials to a device via magic crypto keys. These crypto keys are data, and given how tech companies get away with having no actual customer support, 2FA ends up turning data loss into account access loss.
Mandatory 2FA is a trap, a time ticking bomb, because it's way too easy to make a mistake and lose the keys - and if the backend follows the current High Security Standards, this is irreversible even from the vendor side.
Compare that to expectations people have about the real world - if you lose all your keys to your home or your car, you... just go to a locksmith and show some plausible proof of ownership, and they'll legally break in and replace the locks for you. If you can't produce a plausible proof of ownership, you involve police in the process. And so on. There's always a recovery path.
And most people aren't going to forget a password they put in almost every day that never changes. I don't see why that kind of full disk encryption is so bad.
Apple manages a recovery path for users without storing the key in plain text. Must have something to do with those "security aficionados."
