SMS for two-factors authentication

Having spent now a few days at the 34C3 (I’ll leave comments over that to discussion to happen in front of a very warm coffee with a nice croissant to the side), I have heard a few times already presenters referencing the SS7 hack as an everyday security threat. You probably are not surprised I don’t agree with that being an everyday security issue, while still thinking this is a real security issue.

Indeed, while some websites refer to the SS7 hack as the reason not to use SMS for auth, at least you can find more reasonable articles talking about the updated NIST recommendation. Myself, the preference for TOTP (as it’s used in authenticator apps), is because I don’t need to be registered on a mobile network and I can use it to login while in flights.

I want to share some more thoughts that add up to the list of reasons to not use SMS as the second factor authentication. Because while I do not believe SS7 attack is something that all users should be accounting for in their day-to-day life, it is an addition to the list of reasons why SMS auth is not a good idea at all, and I don’t want people to think that, since they are unlikely to be attacked by someone leveraging SS7, they are okay with using SMS authentication instead.

The obvious first problem is reliability: as I said in the post linked above, SMS-based authentication requires you to have access to the phone with the SIM, and that it’s connected to the network and allowed to receive the SMS. This is fine if you never travel and you have good reception where you need to use this. But myself, I have had multiple situations in which I was unable to receive SMS (in flights as I said already, or while visiting China the first time, with 3 Ireland not giving access to any roaming partners to pay-as-you-go customers, or even at my own desk at my office with 3 UK after I moved to London).

This lack of reliability is unfortunate, but not by itself a security issue: it prevents you from accessing the account that the 2FA is set on, and that would sound like it’s doing what it’s designed to do, failing close. At the same time, this increases the friction of using 2FA, reducing usability, and pushing users, bit by bit, to stop using 2FA altogether. Which is a security problem.

The other problem is the ability to intercept or hijack those messages. As you can guess by what I wrote above, I’m not referring to SS7 hacks or equivalent. It’s all significantly more simple.

The first way to intercept the SMS auth messages is having access to the phone itself. Most phones, iOS and Android alike, are configured to show new text messages in the standby page. In some cases, only a part of the message is visible, and to have access to the rest of the message you’d have to unlock the phone – assuming the phone is locked at all – but 2FA authentication messages tend to be very short and to the point, showing the number in the preview, for ease of access. On Android, such a message can also be swiped away without unlocking the phone. An user that would be victim to this type of interception might have a very hard time noticing this, as nowadays it’s likely the SMS app is not opened very often, and a swiped-off notification would take time to be noticed¹.

The hijacking I have in mind is a bit more complicated and (probably) noticeable. Instead of using the SS7 hack, you can just take over a phone number by leveraging the phone providers. And this can be done in (at least) two ways: you can convince the victim’s phone provider to reprovision the number to a new SIM card within the same operator, or you can port the number to a new operator. The complexity or easiness of these two processes change a lot between countries, some countries are safer than others.

For instance, the UK system for number portability is what I expect to be the more secure (if not the most userfriendly) I have seen. The first step is to get a Portability Authorization Code (PAC) for the number you want to port. You do that by calling the current provider. None of the three providers I had up to now in the UK had any way to get this code online, which is a tad safer, as a misplaced password cannot bring full access to the account line. And while the code could be “intercepted” the same way as I pointed out above for authentication codes, the (new) operator does get in touch with you reminding you when the portability will take place, and giving you a chance to contact them if it doesn’t sound right. In the case of Vodafone, they also send you an email when you request the PAC, meaning just swiping away the notification is not enough to hide the fact that it was requested in the first place.

In Ireland, a portability request completes in the span of less than an hour, and only requires you to have (brief) access to the line you want to take over, as the new operator will send you a code to confirm the request. Which means the process, while being significantly easier for the customers, is also extremely insecure. In Italy, I actually went to the store with the line that I wanted to port, and I don’t remember if they asked anything but my IDs to open the new line. No authentication code is involved at all, so if you can fake enough documents, you likely can take over any lines. I do not remember if they notified my old SIM card before the move. I have not tried number portability in France, but it appears you can get the RIO (the equivalent transfer code) from the online system of Free at the very least.

The good thing about all the portability processes I’ve seen up to now is that at least they do not drop a new number on the old SIM card. I was told that this is (or was at least) actually common for US providers, where porting a number out just assign a new number to the old SIM. In that case, it would probably take a while for a victim to notice they had their account taken over. And that would not be a surprise.

If you’re curious, you can probably try that by yourself. Call your phone provider from another number than your own, see how many and which security questions they ask you to identify that it is actually their customer calling, instead of a random stranger. I think the funniest I’ve had was Three Ireland, that asked me for the number I “recently” sent a text message to, or a recent call made or received — you can imagine that it’s extremely easy to force you to get someone to send you a text message, or have them call you, if you’re close enough to them, or even just have them pick up the phone and reporting to the provider that you were last called by the number you used.

And then there is the other interesting point of SMS-based authentication: the codes last longer in time. A TOTP has a short lifetime by design, as it’s time based. Add some fuzzing, most of the implementations I’ve seen allow a single code to be valid for 2× the time the code is displayed on the authenticator, by accepting a code from the past, or from the future, generally at half the expected duration. Since the normal case has the code lasting for 60 seconds, they would accept a code 30 seconds before it’s supposed to be used, and 30 seconds after. But text messages can (and do) take much longer than that.

And this is particularly useful for attackers of systems that do not implement 2FA correctly. Entering the wrong OTP most of the time does not invalidate a login attempt, at least not on the first mistake, because users can mistype, or they can miss the window to send an OTP over. But sometimes there are egregious errors, such as that made by N26, where they neither ratelimited, nor invalidated the OTP requests, allowing a simple bruteforcing of a valid OTP. Since TOTP change without requesting a new code, bruteforcing those give you a particularly short time span of viability… SMS on the other hand, open for a much larger window of opportunity.

Oh and remember the Barclays single-factor-authentication? How long do you think it would take to spoof the outgoing number of the SMS that needs to be sent (with the text “Y”) to authorize the transaction, even without having access to the text message that was sent?