- I make websites
- If someone is banned twice (two accounts) I want it to take them more than 5min and a VPN to make a 3rd account
- I’m okay with extreme solutions, like requiring everyone to have a Yubikey-or-similar physical key
- I really hate the trend of relying on a phone number or Google capcha as a not-a-bot detection. Both have tons of problems
- but spam (automated account creation) is a real problem
What kind of auth should I use for my websites?
Issue #1 - bots bruteforcing login forms: add a 2FA in form of a TOTP? Simple to setup / create, doesn’t depend on 3rd party services and it is less extreme than a Yubikey while providing the same level of security. If you can enable that for all users you can add it straight to the login form after the password, this way bots won’t even know if a password they try is correct or not, you can refuse them all with a simple “email, password or 2FA code incorrect”.
Issue #2 - bots creating fake accounts: decoy email and password fields on your registration form helps reducing the number of fake accounts. Create your input for email and password with the id / name “email” and “password” and hide them with CSS. Then you create the real inputs with an id like “zipcode” or some other thing that would throw bots off. Server side you set that if the email and password inputs are submitted with anything else than an empty value it should return 401 and/or block the IP address. You can play a lot with this and add checks both client side and server side. To step up the game you can create all those fields dynamically in JS with random IDs based on some algorithm so the backend knows how to identify the real ones.
There are also a few self-hosted captcha options that can be as full featured as google’s or simply add a few font awesome icons and ask people to pick the right one.
Updates:
Please be wary of accessibility with #2. Password managers can also fail with this solution. Every time you mess up with the basic web, you have to think about password managers and people with disabilities.
Password managers hate this trick
I suspect screen readers and a11y tools hate this as well.
Trust me, as a screen reader user, things like this make our lives absolute hell.
could this cause accessibility issues for screen readers?
I’m sure it will, it may also break a few password managers.