Asklemmy

43908 readers

1308 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

201

Can I refuse MS Authenticator? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

247 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So my company decided to migrate office suite and email etc to Microsoft365. Whatever. But for 2FA login they decided to disable the option to choose "any authenticator" and force Microsoft Authenticator on the (private) phones of both employees and volunteers. Is there any valid reason why they would do this, like it's demonstrably safer? Or is this a battle I can pick to shield myself a little from MS?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

reasons why restricting users to MS Authenticator would be preferable

As a security professional:

Under most situations, it is equally as good as any other 2FA app.
Within the Microsoft ecosystem, it provides additional security features above and beyond simple 2FA.

If your workplace is leaning heavily on the Microsoft ecosystem, especially their cloud offerings like Azure, then restricting employees to the Microsoft app is a no-brainer, and actually quite reasonable.

For example, if they happen to have a hybrid domain with an on-prem domain controller syncing with Azure (forgive me for using obsolete terms, I’m a greybeard), then they can control all access to all company assets, including 2FA. If an employee leaves the company, they can also disable the Microsoft app at a moment’s notice by disabling the employee’s Microsoft account. Because everything is hooked into Azure, it sends push notifications down to all company assets - like the Microsoft 2FA app - to unhook all of the company’s credentials and prevent employee access after the fact.

You cannot do this with other 2FA apps.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is disingenuous though... You can simply reset the TOTP seed on any account to achieve the same operation. We use AuthLite on a local domain... I can disable an account domain-wide by simply resetting the TOTP seed or disabling the account. Using an Azure domain and MS app doesn't add any value in that regards. All of the online office stuff can be linked onto a local domain as well and would also be disabled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You don't even need to disable an ex-employee's ability to generate TOTP codes... Once the account is disabled what use are the codes?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Well that's a bit of the point of my post... why are you making it out like disabling the 2fa app matters?

Edit: Swype typos!