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May 8 – 12, 2023
Norfolk Waterside Marriott
US/Eastern timezone

Improving computer security in HEP with multiple factor authentication: experience and reflections

May 9, 2023, 4:45 PM
15m
Marriott Ballroom II-III (Norfolk Waterside Marriott)

Marriott Ballroom II-III

Norfolk Waterside Marriott

235 East Main Street Norfolk, VA 23510
Oral Track 4 - Distributed Computing Track 4 - Distributed Computing

Speaker

Ahmad, Adeel (CERN)

Description

In 2022, CERN ran its annual phishing campaign in which 2000 users gave away their passwords (Note: this number is in line with results of campaigns at other organisations). In a real phishing incident this would have meant 2000 compromised accounts... unless they were protected by Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)! In the same year, CERN introduced 2FA for accounts with access to critical services. The new login flow requires users to always authenticate with a 2FA token (either TOTP or WebAuthn), introducing a significant security improvement for the individual and the laboratory. In this paper we will discuss the rationale behind the 2FA deployment, as well as the technical setup of 2FA in CERN's Single Sign-On, Keycloak. We will share statistics on how users are responding to the change, and concrete actions we have taken thanks to their feedback. Finally, we briefly cover our custom extensions to Keycloak for specific use cases, which include, persistent cookies and our Kerberos setup.

Consider for long presentation No

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