I personally am fine with this.
Yup. I’m actually a bit baffled by how much negativity/misinformation there’s around 2FA even in a place like this, which should naturally have a more technically inclined userbase.
I dislike MFA because it creates a risk of losing access to my account. I can back up my passwords; I can’t back up a hardware device.
Normally you get a handful of recovery codes when you set up 2FA. If not, you can just create a backup of the QR-Code or secret when setting up 2FA and store it in a safe location. And even if all that fails there’s usually a way to recover an account by going through support.
Although I wouldn’t recommend it, there’s also 2FA apps out there that have cloud-sync.
It’s pretty hard to hand-write a QR code, I don’t wish to pay the printer cartel $50 for the privilege of printing it, and it would of course be horribly insecure to print it with someone else’s printer.
And how would I use the QR code? I can’t scan it with my phone’s camera because allowing my phone access to my GitHub account is a security risk, and I can’t scan it with my desktop because it doesn’t have a camera.
So, how is this going to work? How do I recover my GitHub account without making it less secure than it is with just a password?
A hardware device is a physical key. Its no different than backing up your home key. Get two keys and copy them. Keep one on you, and the other in a safe somewhere in case you lose the first.
Hardware tokens are specifically designed to resist copying. Any means of copying it would be considered a security vulnerability.
Bits rot. A hardware token kept in a bank vault may or may not still work when I need it 10 years later, and there is no reasonable process for regularly verifying the integrity of its contents. Backup drives’ checksums are verified with every backup cycle, and so are the checksums on the file system being backed up (I’m using btrfs for that reason).
Hardware tokens are expensive. Mechanical lock keys are not.