I can see what you mean, but that's not to say a normal person would be likely to do it better themselves though. Lock levels are selected (perhaps naïvely sometimes), based on a certain tolerable level of inconvenience and cost factor.
Luckily software is cheaper to implement strongly, but still email + password is usually selected as the method in spite of being the easiest thing to crack (as far as getting into individual accounts is concerned).
We could get users to all use ubikeys or more complex forms of multiple factor auth.
We could make it so that if you compromise an email account, you can't just reset all the external account passwords using it.
Plenty of sites allow insecure passwords that are in rainbow tables and cannot defend against targeted attacks (unless a user actually selects a strong password themselves).
Also just as houses often have big windows that can be smashed, perfect crypto / secure auth practices fail to work with the presence of an exploit somewhere else in the stack are frequent sources of compromise too.
It's not a perfect analogy of course, but actually I don't think locks / houses is a bad one. Users don't value security enough to want the most secure locks on their accounts and frequently get annoyed if asked to use 2-factor Auth, multiple passwords for single sites etc.
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I can see what you mean, but that's not to say a normal person would be likely to do it better themselves though. Lock levels are selected (perhaps naïvely sometimes), based on a certain tolerable level of inconvenience and cost factor.
Luckily software is cheaper to implement strongly, but still email + password is usually selected as the method in spite of being the easiest thing to crack (as far as getting into individual accounts is concerned).
We could get users to all use ubikeys or more complex forms of multiple factor auth.
We could make it so that if you compromise an email account, you can't just reset all the external account passwords using it.
Plenty of sites allow insecure passwords that are in rainbow tables and cannot defend against targeted attacks (unless a user actually selects a strong password themselves).
Also just as houses often have big windows that can be smashed, perfect crypto / secure auth practices fail to work with the presence of an exploit somewhere else in the stack are frequent sources of compromise too.
It's not a perfect analogy of course, but actually I don't think locks / houses is a bad one. Users don't value security enough to want the most secure locks on their accounts and frequently get annoyed if asked to use 2-factor Auth, multiple passwords for single sites etc.