this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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The modern direction is actually going the other way. Tying identity to hardware, preventing access on unapproved or uncompliant hardware. It has the advantage of allowing biometrics or things like simple pins. In an ideal world, SSO would ensure that every single account, across the many vendors, have these protections, although we are far from a perfect world.
SSO means you only need to compromise one piece of hardware to get access to everything.
Effectively, the other option is passwords, and people are really, really, bad at passwords. Password managers help, but then you just need to compromise the password manager. Strong SSO, backed by hardware, at least makes the attack need to be either physical, or running on a hardware approved by the company. When you mix that with strong execution protections, an EDR, and general policy enforcement and compliance checking, you get protection that beats the pants off 30 different passwords to 30 different sites, or more realistically, 3 passwords to 30 different sites.
Yes, much better than 3-30 passwords.
But I view SSO as enterprise password manager with a nice UI. I don't trust it for anything super important.