search

AdaHeads / call-flow-control

Call-information flow server.
Other
6 stars 8 forks source link

Plain user login with tokens instead of OpenID #94

Closed ThomasLocke closed 10 years ago

ThomasLocke commented 11 years ago

Since we (Responsum) made the switch to Google Apps for our e-mail / file sharing needs, we've learned one important lesson: Maintaining users with proper passwords is a huge pain.

It's actually so much of a pain, that I've had to create a secret file with all the users and passwords in it. Why? Because my users simply cannot remember their own passwords, and constantly resetting them is a pain in the neck.

People forget their passwords, primarily because I don't allow that they use their normal password of 123secret or abc123 or other similar horrors.

So that got me thinking: If we make the switch to a Snom hardware telephone, then we're going to need some method of coupling a Bob user login to a specific telephone. @rostgaard suggested a challenge/response system, where Bob provided the user with a pin code and the user would then match a telephone to his/her session by entering the pin code on any given telephone.

At first I didn't like that very much, as it seemed to me that we forced the user to do a double login every single day, but then it dawned on me: How about using that pin code / token as the password for the user? That way we could eliminate the need for OpenID logins for plain users.

We win on several fronts:

  1. Coupling a telephone to a user is taken care of.
  2. A user can login to the system, even if the OpenID provider is down.
  3. Improved usability for administrators - no need to create external Google/whatever accounts for plain users.
  4. Improved usability for users - no need to remember passwords. @TrineLocke likes this one a lot. :)

Perhaps with a bit of effort, we could also use the pin code / token system for administrative users, and let go of the OpenID login completely? It would allow us to remove a rather large blob of code from Alice. Just a thought.

What do you guys think?

rostgaard commented 11 years ago

:+1:

sparre commented 11 years ago

To me this sounds like falling back to password-based login, but I suppose you mean something else?

PedersenThomas commented 11 years ago

I think @ThomasLocke means with pin code is a dynamicly generated code, which is never used twice. So nothing to remeber for the agent.

sparre commented 11 years ago

How would that let us authenticate the users?

ThomasLocke commented 11 years ago

@sparre well, it wouldn't, but since everything single call is recorded, it's pretty hard for me to pose as Trine, so the question is: Does authentication matter for plain users?

Granted I'm not totally convinced that authentication doesn't matter, which of course is why I ended the initial post with a question to you all. :)

rostgaard commented 10 years ago

Challenge/response is already outlined in #100 and #101 so let close this discussion, and keep the "do-the-implementation" issues.