Is it an open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement?
When the answer is yes, there is a high probability that it's something reasonable, e.g. TOTP.
When the answer is no, what you will find behind the curtain is either a fool or a crook.
Who is doing the securing, whose interests are being secured, and against who/what?
Security isn't an unqualified good thing to have. It's just an instrument of control. Who wields it and how are the paramount questions. You can have an "open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement", aimed at protecting interest of third parties, by securing the device from its actual owner. In fact, that describes many, if not most, security measures introduced in computing over the past 20 years, especially on the web and mobile devices.
But it helps against account sharing, err I mean they make database leaks irrelevant except for private info of the customer, err I mean that we can now send more mail to the customer about new AI features without risking they think it is phishing, err I mean this is the easiest measure for the auditor findings so since we implemented this we don't need to fix all the crappy internal api auth problems and atrocious out of date dependencies, err I mean...
This is actually a feature, very common in real world, that security maximalists keep insisting is a bug.
Also, the original sin: framing it as "security" vs. "convenience". It's not. The other end of the spectrum is utility - as in, maximally secure computing device is an inert rock. More security means less utility - reduced functionality, constrained capability, reasonable use cases no longer possible. It means manual process where previously automation or batching was possible. It means more electricity, more compute, more money spent.
It means more user time and therefore more human lives wasted.
This ultimate non-renewable resource is what we're trading off when we accept even more security. This trade-off needs to be respected much more than it is.
That’s not what’s happening. Here you have security used as an excuse for vendor lock ins. Just like AI is used as an excuse for layoffs. But you shouldn’t confuse actual security with BS like this.
Literally no one in security thinks this.
See Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Reminds me of what Ubiquiti tried to pull a few weeks ago. They wanted to force everyone to their Cloud UI and login instead of the local interfaces so they reduced the local session lifetime to something insane like 20 minutes while lying to our faces and saying it is for security, and kept the session lifetime longer on their cloud panels. They made sure to exclude this from their changelog too.
The community started monkey patching their local scripts, wrote services to undo their changes, many people disabled auto-updates as Ubiquiti only makes their product worse with their updates. Publicly complained on their support forum that we are onto their little plot.
They ended up backtracking for now but you just know they will try again like Google does.