this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Great news! Mullvad is great even if their account security makes you do a double take
what do you mean?
I assume they mean there are no account credentials. When you "create" an account on their website, you'll be given a random account number, and no password.
Yeah this is what I meant. It feels so wrong but also makes complete sense.
I think I've gotten used to the "safety" of setting my own password and always typing it with my email or username.
But practically speaking they're very similar and Mullvad's is arguably safer
I think of it more as "no username, only password". Realistically, usernames are not expected to be secure or private, so this is effectively the same.
What's to stop somebody guessing your account number and gaining access? (Honest question)
There are lots of possible account numbers, much more than there are accounts. So there is a very small chance that you will guess an active paid account.
And if you do, there's not much you can get out of it. There's no personal information tied to the account.
I am surprised that they don’t provide UUIDv4’s, feels like what they provide is somewhat guessable
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2017/6/20/mullvads-account-numbers-get-longer-and-safer/
As they outline here, there are ~9 quadrillion possible keys, needing around 5.5 million guesses to find an account. I think they hit a nice middleground between decent entropy and still having a number you can memorize (like a credit card).
people memorize their credit card numbers?
Nowadays, not so much. In the previous decades before password managers, card vaulting, apple pay and so on: yes, if you were typing it in or writing it on forms frequently, it wasn't uncommon to just memorize it.
My point though was that there is a limit to our ability to remember long and random alphanumeric strings, and I find credit card numbers to be that limit. UUIDs are longer and have a much bigger character set.
I never put my cc in any password manager, but I also mostly just use it for online payments where I don't mind taking out the actual card to type the number in