Work in progress: Identifying Two-Factor Authentication Support in Banking Sites

TL;DR

This study develops a text-analysis scoring scheme to automatically identify 2FA support in banking websites, revealing limited adoption of two-factor authentication across global banks.

Contribution

Introduces a novel heuristic-based algorithm for detecting 2FA support in bank websites using automated text analysis.

Findings

2FA support is not yet widespread among banks.

The scoring scheme effectively identifies 2FA presence.

Preliminary results highlight the need for increased 2FA adoption.

Abstract

Two-factor authentication (2FA) offers several security benefits that security-conscious users might expect from high-value services such as online banks. In this work, we present our preliminary study to develop a scoring scheme to automatically recognize when bank sites mention support for two-factor authentication. We extract information related to security features (primarily 2FA) offered by 379 bank domains from 93 countries. We use a subset of these sites to refine our scoring scheme to include several heuristics for identifying whether sites offer 2FA. For each bank domain in our dataset, we use our algorithm based on text-analysis to calculate whether the domain offers 2FA to the users of the domain's online banking platform. Our preliminary findings suggest that 2FA is yet to be widely adopted by banking domains.