41 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Family Single Sign On Was a Bad Idea"
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date: 2024-11-23T21:41:39+02:00
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---
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When my eldest son became of an email-qualified age, I set him up a
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[Bitwarden][1] instance, so he can keep his password there. He *loved it*,
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because, it turns out, a 7-year-old finds a personal digital space important or
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exciting or both.
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My password manager instance is not open to the public internet, necessitating
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use of [VPN software][2], which needed a method to authenticate (a.k.a. login
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method).
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As someone inundated into "best practice" security policies of a 10k+-engineer
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corporation for quite a while, I built my home authentication system using the
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only method I really respected: single-sign-on. I thought that having a single
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password for all of our services will be convenient and quite easy. So I set up
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SSO for a few services that my family uses, including the VPN software.
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After thinking about it for ~2 years I realized that single-sign-on allows
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companies quickly onboard new employees, as well as quickly revoke access from
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leaving individuals. Expanding family is limited by obvious constraints, and
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people generally leave families *very rarely*, making the main SSO selling
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point quite moot.
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To sum up, having a "single password" was unnecessary, since everyone use a
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password manager anyway. In a small-family setting, where nobody generally
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leaves "the company" and my time to maintain the SSO sand-castle is limited, it
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is an unnecessary overkill. I am quite surprised it took so long to understand
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that. Maybe my tolerance for self-induced bullshit is too high? Something to
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consider.
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So my next project is to de-tangle the SSO mess that I put myself in and create
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separate users and app-passwords for each thing we use. The prospect of
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executing this "migration" is not fun, but the end result will be better,
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because things will get simpler for everyone.
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[1]: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
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[2]: https://headscale.net/
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