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Security experts are constantly discouraging users from using SMS-based 2FA systems, usually because of worries the auth code could be intercepted by an attacker, either through a SIM swap or a MitM attack.

The problem I see with this statement is that both of these attacks to me feel like they're essentially only really feasible for attacks targeted at a specific user with the goal of breaching a targeted service. Attacks like the one that breached Reddit last year, where a Reddit administrator had his SMS 2FA token intercepted.

You can't do SIM swap attacks in an automated way or even at scale (unless there is a serious issue with a phone provider). The average cybercriminal doesn't have the required resources to MitM intercept SMS messages for people spread across a city, country or continent. The way I interpret this, the only people who should actively avoid SMS-based 2FA systems are those who are likely to be targeted for specific attacks, but those are few and far between.

Consider an average Joe, who has about 100 accounts, but doesn't use a password manager (so he has password reuse). He doesn't have special access to any major services. He doesn't have any celebrity status or special usernames anywhere. He is a regular, non-management employee at his office with no special access to his company codebase or product. Put a different way, he's unlikely to ever be the target of an attack specifically targeted at him.

In this context, should Joe be concerned that the SMS-based 2FA he uses for Facebook, Twitter, Google, Dropbox, Slack and Nest has theoretical vulnerabilities?

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    @SoufianeTahiri Actually no, it's not terribly secure, but it's still better than nothing, and the vast majority of people with online accounts have a way to receive SMS. TOTP is better, but there are more barriers to getting people to use it (have to install an app, have to actually open the app to use it instead of getting a notification with the code, etc). This doesn't mean SMS it's good enough and you shouldn't be worried, it just raises the bar a bit for attackers. Sep 20, 2019 at 13:46
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    @AndrolGenhald, Yep I know it's not terribly secure, but as Nazll said there is no "known" way to scale the attack, so except if you're a high-profit target, there is almost NO need to worry about SS7/SIM swapping or any other similar attacks... The question was not which is better TOTP or 2FA (and yes I agree with you, TOTP is more secure) Sep 20, 2019 at 14:53
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    Even though Alice is not a high-value target, if by attacking Alice's Slack account, the attacker gains access sufficient to reveal that Bob is a high-value target, the attack was of value. Many attacks against "average" people, are not about the person attacked, but gaining the ability to attack someone that person knows, so its hard to make a value judgement about an attack against an "average user with no special access rights."
    – Randall
    Sep 20, 2019 at 19:35
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    The main problem with weak second factors like SMS and even email is when it is used as the sole factor for things like account recovery. This can’t be turned off on some larger services because they don’t want to deal with the recovery support. This is why for example Google for their high security setting severely restrict the recovery options and require redundant second factor tokens to begin with.
    – eckes
    Sep 21, 2019 at 14:09
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    As a comment, there have been widescale attacks against SMS 2FA protecting German bank accounts. The banks in general have moved to more secure proprietary 2FA mechanisms. Sep 23, 2019 at 9:10

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There is no real concept of an "average user with no special access rights". From the perspective of an attacker the main point is if the effort needed for an attack is less then the gain of the attack. Even an "average user" might have crypto wallets or precious twitter accounts. Sometimes the gain of an attack is also not that obvious, like when a seemingly unimportant target is hacked as the initial step in a larger delivery chain attack against a more precious and better protected target.

For some examples of successful attacks see

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    Yes, but what I mean is, why would an attacker bother trying to social engineer a CS rep into swapping a sim out or try and intercept an SMS through a MitM attack by being at the right place, when the average service has millions of other accounts that are probably not 2FA secured?
    – Nzall
    Sep 20, 2019 at 14:32
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    @Nzall: because (to cite myself) "the main point is if the effort needed for an attack is less then the gain of the attack". If the other less protected accounts have nothing interesting to offer then why waste precious time? Sure, if there is another less protected account which is a similar worthy target then one would likely attack this one first. Sep 20, 2019 at 14:47
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    Also: medium.com/coinmonks/… Sep 21, 2019 at 1:33
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    So what's your answer to the question? All users should worry about this? [I find answers with a clear answer or conclusion to be clearer overall and less ambiguous]
    – NotThatGuy
    Sep 21, 2019 at 14:51
  • @NotThatGuy: The attacks are targeted and take some effort to do. This means that you likely will be attacked only if you have something valuable to steal (direct attack) or if you have the trust or connection to somebody who might be a worthy target (attacking you as the first step in attacking others by using trust relationships). You probably better know than me if you are a worthy target then. Sep 21, 2019 at 19:16
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Like many things, there is a tiny bit of truth in there, but overall it is a non-issue in practice and incidents are reported/perceived totally out of perspective.
Most stuff, including every new system that comes up every few months and that completely obsoletes everything else is usually based on personal financial interests, dogma, belief, and snake oil. So, recently, SMS-TAN was obsoleted. And the world didn't stop.

How dare I say it's a non-issue? There's some very real security breaches!

First of all, it's two factor authentication. Which means that any amount of TANs sent in the SMS is completely worthless if the mark hasn't already given away their password or such (which is usually the first factor).
Without providing the first factor, you do not even get to trigger the SMS to be sent. If the legitimate account owner triggered it, then he is currently in the process of logging in, i.e. he has a TLS connection going. The TAN won't work for anything but for the action it was triggered for either, so it's not really useful for much.

You eavesdrop my SMS? Well go ahead. What are you going to do? Unless you also have a gun so you can force me to step away from the keyboard, or you can spoof my IP address and have subverted TLS so much that you can successfully take over the connection (really, WTF? who do we defend against in this threat model?), there is not much you can do. I mean, there's reasonable things to expect, and unreasonable things. Do I need to defend against the possibility of a 2km large meteor hitting my house? If someone can take over my TLS connection, then I have more serious problems than SMS being interceptable.

Unless of course it was you who initiated the SMS-TAN in the first place, which means you must already know my password.

So a reddit sysadmin gave away his admin password or had such a pathetically bad password that it was easy to social-engineer. Or, something else that is outright face-palm scary, whatever. Took a girl he met in the bar the night before to his workplace to impress her, logged in, and walked away? Something the like?
Wow, clearly the fact that SMS can be intercepted was the problem!

SMS 2FA is the same as every other 2FA. It is a little extra hurdle that an attacker has to take, once they have the first factor. It's not much, but it's better than nothing. For the casual attacker on a random target, that little extra makes the difference between "doable" and "not doable". For example, you may get to know my Google password by chance, but you do not know my phone number (or where I even live). So, technical difficulties aside, how are you going to intercept my SMS at all?

Will 2FA stop a targetted attack by a determined attacker? Well no, it probably won't. But what will? I can always tie your girlfriend to a chair and have you watch me cut off fingers until you perform the authentication. Make it five factor authentication if you will, it won't take more than two or three fingers.

On the basis that SMS-TAN is insecure, my bank replaced TAN via SMS with a totally insecure pair of custom-made apps that will allow a transaction to be initiated, and confirmed, without ever a password or such being entered. Android's biometry API telling it "yeah, OK" is enough. It's been demonstrated that facial recognition is easy to trick.
So yeah, this is definitively so much better and more secure than having to enter a password over TLS (which is stored in Keepass) and to receive a TAN via SMS, which is worthless to anyone else.

The simple truth is, sending SMS-TAN costs money, and that stupid little app doesn't...

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    Obligatory xkcd. Sep 20, 2019 at 22:21
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    "First of all, it's two factor authentication. Which means that any amount of TANs sent in the SMS is completely worthless if the mark hasn't already given away their password or such" <-- this is blatantly false. In practice, basically every single service that allows and encourages SMS "2FA" is actually delivering SMS 1FA: they allow account recovery via just the phone number/SMS, without requiring the password. Sep 21, 2019 at 1:16
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    @R.: That may be true, but it is irrelevant. Not few services will email you a password reset link, or worse, a plaintext password (which means they have a plaintext password stored). So, yeah, some people just get it wrong. Does that have any implications to proper 2FA? No. This is like the recommendation back in 2018 to no longer encrypt email because some exploits in the mail client could (maybe) allow an attacker to read them. Sure, no encryption at all is a good solution! Why not deliberately leave your door wide open because someone could drive a truck into it to break in.
    – Damon
    Sep 21, 2019 at 16:50
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    @SteffenUllrich: Some truth in it, but what I meant to say is that the first factor is not perfect. Nothing is perfect. A second factor (or third) is not perfect either, but to the average wannabe hacker it's undefeatable. It won't stand against a targetted governmental attack or organized crime, sure. But like I said, you do not even know my phone number, so how are you going to intercept my SMS? Neither do you know my password, so how do you get them sent? That's assuming a no-shit implementation that doesn't just send out SMS like that, or displays "Sending confirmation to 01234567890"_.
    – Damon
    Sep 21, 2019 at 16:54
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    @Damon: Even an "average user with no special access rights" (whatever this is) might be a worthy target of a targeted attack because he has valuable stuff himself or might be a step to get access to valuable stuff (delivery chain attack). And SIM swap is actually not that hard to do as several examples from the past show, i.e. no need for "governmental attack or organized crime" but all what is needed is a determined hacker with some social skills. And the phone numbers itself are usually not kept like a very valuable secret nobody should know: most don't have a number only for 2FA. Sep 21, 2019 at 17:10
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"Should I worry?" is not a technical question-- you can worry about anything you want. For Information Security purposes it is more helpful to consider specific threats, balancing their probability and risk against cost and inconvenience.

A different question you could ask is whether SMS 2FA is sufficient mitigation against criminal teams working on mass harvesting of credentials (and, for example, posting them for sale on the dark net). The answer to that is-- yeah, it's pretty good. Even if they were able to obtain a 2FA SMS code, it would not have any resale value since it is only good for a few minutes. So in terms of criminal networks reselling credentials, it is a decent mitigation. That is one kind of threat.

Another kind of threat is a criminal team or malicious user targeting you as an individual and in real time. In that scenario, SMS is completely inadequate, for reasons that I think you already understand. It is much too easy to get that code if they have the necessary resources.

That being said, NIST, FFIEC, PCI, ISO-27001, and other forms of security regulation/compliance/guidance are all moving away from SMS 2FA in favor of other options that are becoming more available as the technology evolves. But the public will take time to catch up. Heck, 90% of gmail users don't use any 2FA, let alone a securID token! That is why SMS two factor authentication isn't perfect, but you should still use it..

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Although SMS 2FA is not as strong as TOTP base MFA or the use of a hardware security key (e.g. yubikey) it still offers a significant amount of protection against the typical attacker who's just trying to make use of weak or compromised passwords.

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The problem I see with this statement is that both of these attacks to me feel like they're essentially only really feasible for attacks targeted at a specific user with the goal of breaching a targeted service.

[...]

You can't do SIM swap attacks in an automated way or even at scale (unless there is a serious issue with a phone provider).

[...]

The average cybercriminal doesn't have the required resources to MitM intercept SMS messages for people spread across a city, country or continent.

You don't always need SIM swap or MitM. Some simple attacks like phishing are already automated and that applies to 2FA codes too.

Now this kind of attack would also bypass other kinds of one-time passwords like smartphone authentication apps, and maybe even login prompts. They would be stopped by token-based 2FA like Yubikeys, since the browser would check that the domain is correct.

Also, I guess it would not be impossible for someone to hack into a phone network and run an untargeted attack while intercepting 2FA SMSs for a while until they get caught.

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