Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
>On 15-02-19 09:27 AM, MZMcBride wrote:
>>In a second or third iteration, we'd ideally have an intermediate
>>post-login screen that allows the user to select an account to use.
>
>That would be a catastrophe, from a privacy standpoint; even if we
>restrict this to verified email addresses, there is no possible
>guarantee that the person who controled email address x@y in the past is
>the person who controls it today.

My understanding is that this intermediate screen would only trigger if an
account is using both the same verified e-mail address _and_ the same
password. I don't believe there's any privilege escalation or privacy
concern to allow users to login to multiple accounts that share an e-mail
address (considered private/secret) and that share a password, which are
the two inputs we'd be accepting during user login.

It's checking multiple passwords that starts to introduce a lot more
concerns about timing attacks, as I understand it. This is a hard problem,
as we typically want password verification to be relatively slow.

That said, these types of concerns that you're raising are fantastic to
consider and discuss (thank you!). I think we need a lot of scrutiny in
this area to ensure that we implement a sane, secure solution.

>It would also have horrid security implication if you allow further
>creation of accounts sharing an email (which would be necessary to make
>that feature useful): create an account with the email of someone you
>want to find the Wikimedia account of, log in, be presented with the
>accounts.

Same as above, I think. :-)

MZMcBride



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