Do extremely short credential lifetimes actually help security? (piefed.social)

submitted 3 days ago by lnklnx@piefed.social to c/cybersecurity@sh.itjust.works

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My company has an external auth provider for the whole organization, and MFA is required (push notification to a phone app). This all works well and I agree with it, BUT they have configured the credentials to expire in 20 minutes. In practice this means everyone in the company is typing their password and fiddling with their phone dozens of times per day to work with any application except for email (somehow it gets away with caching the credentials).

Timeouts for credentials are good, but does this aggressively low setting actually provide increased security?

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[-] blarth 1 points 2 days ago

In my opinion, somewhat. Tokens that expire can’t be used persistently for exploitation, but if an attacker was able to obtain said token, why wouldn’t they be able to continue obtaining new ones?

Passkeys are the perfect antidote, but their adoption has been hindered by a lack of understanding of how they work, where they’re stored, and a renewed SSO tax, among over factors.

this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026

16 points (94.4% liked)

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