The new login method is problematic

[Julie_7]

The login method for Fusion 360 changed with the latest update. I believe it was:

Fusion 360 2.0.15995 x86_64
Active Plan: Personal
Windows 10 Home 22H2 (19045.2728)

I do not understand why login to an application needs to use the web browser. Adding another application into the logging process seems to be less secure, and it is certainly more hassle for the user. It feels awkward and even "unprofessional" somehow.

In addition it is causing multiple jumps between the browser and application. There are multiple dialogs that pop up and need to be understood. I had already responded to the one about certificates or something similar and I have not been able to bring it up again. I felt uncomfortable saying okay for that one.

I will try to group them a bit.

When I signed out of F360 to try and reproduce the certificate dialog, I received this dialog. I don't think there is any reason for the app and my sign in to the web for the forums etc. should be connected. It was just another annoying dialog.

Signing back in somehow put me in what seemed like an endless loop of showing these dialogs over and over. I don't remember the order. Sometimes was more than one open at the same time.

[RajkumarIlanchelian · Accepted solution]

@Julie_7 Thank you for the feedback. I can give you some insights into why this change was made to all of Autodesk products and also try to understand what are some of the issues you are seeing:

The WHY:

1. This experience helps in multiple ways to solve some of the problems reported by our customers for a long time, namely using password managers to sign in. With this improvement you can now use your password manager to login without having to enter your userID/password manually (as was the case until now)

2. This enhancement also uses our improved SDKs that actually improve on the security front for authentication.

3. We have improved authentication cache from 14 days to 30 days meaning that you will not need to enter your authentication for 30 days now (previously 14 days) (unless of course your workflow is to logout every time you close Fusion 360)

The above and many other smaller improvements are the reason we are moving in this direction. There are certainly some feedback we are considering regarding the multiple "extra" clicks involved and switching between applications etc that we hope to add better experience as we move forward. 

The PROBLEMS:

Now to understand some of the problems you called out:

1. Are you hitting the loop that you talked about in a case like this?

Launch Fusion 360
Click on Sign in
Punches you out to a browser
Login there and displayed with Go to product
Clicking on Go to product will bring up the UI to allow "Autodesk Identity Manager to run" Click on YES/OK and also "Always Allow" so that you do not have to go through this particular process every time.
NOW, instead of going to the product the login in FAILS and the Application shows a restart sign-in?

Essentially the Go to product is NOT working?  

[Julie_7]

@RajkumarIlanchelian 

Your are completely correct about the loop. I am glad you could describe it. I didn't want to go back and try to reproduce it.

You didn't mention the auth certification dialog that asked me to override something. (I wish I knew how to easily reproduce it.)

I completely understand you reasons for using the browser and supporting password managers. I will just ignore the loop issue for now, but I have a couple more comments on the implementation.

A slightly different implementation would be to open a new small browser window to look like a dialog in the application and have it close after authenticating so it looks more like part of the app. I have used other products that do it that way.

I was already signed in to my Autodesk in the browser when I needed to sign in to Fusion 360. Autodesk uses the same user account for products and the forums. This didn't automatically log me in to Fusion 360 though. I still had to provide credentials.

Another data point for you is that I use Firefox with containers to keep all data related to an account from being accessed by other tabs. So I have an Autodesk container that is used when I login to the forum and any tab that I open that is at the autodesk.com domain always opens in that container.

I decided to sign out and back in to see if I could provide you with any new information.

Signing out gives me this in the browser. I find this kind of thing annoying, but I am only one person. To me using Fusion 360 and using the browser are two completely different tasks and if I wanted to sign out on the browser I would do so. (Just my opinion.)

This time when I clicked on sign in in Fusion, it opened a new tab in the browser and signed my in automatically.

It did take awhile to get me back to Fusion 360. It appeared to close the application and then reopen it from the beginning leaving me with my work in progress closed. I guess sign out in F360 closes the application, even though it leaves a sign in page open. I had expected that sign out would leave me working offline.

Thanks for the quick reply. I hope you can explain the certificate dialog that I can't find and why I have to accept something that appears non-secure. If you can give me some idea how to reproduce it, I will be happy to give you exact details.

[RajkumarIlanchelian · Accepted solution]

@Julie_7 Thank you once again for taking the time to provide a lot more feedback. I read this twice and notice there is a lot in here from experience to suggestion of improvement etc. I am not going to attempt to answer everything in this post right now but will certainly get back to each of the points you called out once I had time to process each of it and also pass some of this back to our experience  engineering and some to our development engineering. 

The one thing that I want to quickly see if the certificate you talked about. It is very difficult to see what that would be without knowing anything about it since different OS and different browser ask differently from a permissions standpoint. To see if I can catch the certificate that came up can you please attach logs that has a chance that it caught it? 

1. While launching Fusion click on Ctrl+Shift to bring up the Fusion 360 service utility
2. Run the gather system info
3. This will generate two zip files- please attach the diagnostic log files.zip here

This could contain more details about what certificate you saw. (If by change you have a date and an approximate time you may have seen this that could help too).

Thank you once again for your time. With some of this feedback hopefully we can improve on the experience aspect as we move forward. 

[Julie_7]

I kept looking and found an image of this dialog, which was the first one.

Clicking on okay gave me a dialog where I could essentially say "ignore security and proceed" as one  of the choices. At that time I was in a hurry and chose that one.

I am still looking for the other dialog box.

[Julie_7]

@RajkumarIlanchelianThanks for the kind words.

I have attached the diagnostic files.

The first time it happened would have been about the day the release that contained the new method rolled out.

It happened again on 20 or 21 April which prompted me to post about it. I hope I am close enough with the dates. I am basing int on my first post in the topic, but it doesn't have a date. I just shows Friday.

[DANIELSRJ42]

Not being able to remember your username and password is not enough of a reason to change the login method in my opinion. If you can't deal with that when there are so many options to securely save your credentials then there are other issues at hand.  I can't imagine the majority of users who use AutoCAD and other tools with similar login requirements have an issue. Additionally, why not give users the option to opt into this login method? Most software allows for a choice with MFA. In fact, why not just use traditional MFA which is a best practice for most industries and software products?

Lastly, I work in the field, and when I have a poor internet connection this login method does not work well. Your system appears to timeout when you authenticate in the browser takes too long and then the manager errors out.

[Julie_7]

I never said I could not remember name and password. I have no problem with that. I use a password manager.

[hoang.nguyenhuy]

Hi.

My student also have the same problem I have run as admin save password, keep login but it still in the same loop.

I try to find solution on the forum and found your but I did not see the solution yet. Can I as if you have been able to login yet or this one have been put on hold ?

Thanks

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@hoang.nguyenhuy After registering for the account the student should receive an email which has a url they need to accept. 

1. Go to https://login.autodesk360.com/login
2. Login

This will help trigger the email again. If for any reason this is not working, please direct message me the email ID of the student. 

[saxclar]

I encountered this issue and after following the suggestion of @RajkumarIlanchelian of re-navigating to the login page and logging in solved it, but I want to provide some insight into what the root cause was (at least in my case) and why that fix worked.

When I initially signed up, I verified my email, after which I was prompted to create a "team". I don't plan on collaborating with anyone, so I might've thought "I don't need to do this" and closed out the browser or something. I figured I signed up and verified my email, and should be ready to login to the Fusion 360 Application. At this point I entered the loop that was originally reported.

When I found this thread and saw @RajkumarIlanchelian 's suggestion to re-login, even though he suggested to do so to re-prompt email verification and I had already verified, I tried it anyway and was directed back to create a team. I created a team that was just my name, kept the default settings, and finished the dialog, and when I tried to authenticate in the Fusion 360 app again, it worked.

So some conclusions:

• It seems like creating a team is a required part of signing up and that should be communicated. The current sign-up flow does not make this clear, in my opinion.
• Update the error-handling/messaging so it is clear that if a user's login is failing because they have not completed the requisite team creation/joining flow (or for any other reason, for that matter), they are made aware (bonus points for telling them how to fix it).
• I would imagine there are more people like me who might think "why would I create a team when I'm not planning on collaborating with anyone?" If this is true, I think the more user-friendly thing is to not require new users to create a team in the first place.
• If things are set up such that it would be a lot of dev work to make it so a user does not need a team at all, you could ask the user if they plan to collaborate with others during signup, and if they answer no, transparently create a default team for them, or just create the default team for them without creating the extra step, and offer tooltips or some other method of helping users join other teams if they hope to collaborate.

Just my 2 cents, do with it what you will.

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@saxclar Thank you for confirming that you have it now working and also providing the feedback. We are making a few changes on the backend and hopefully that will make it clear that a team hub WILL be needed in order to move forward with the account activation. 

[DANIELSRJ42]

Sorry Julie,

I intended my response to be towards RajkumarIlanchelian that provided a list of reasons for the change and how it helps. I use a password manager too and other custom plug-ins for blocking ads and tracking cookies. So, that is one if the reasons I do not like having to go to a browser to 'authenticate' my login. I have been using AutoCAD and other engineering software for 15 years and AutoCAD is the only company I have seen create this kind of solution. Maybe I missed the pre-release notice, but I just find this extra step annoying even compared to MFA.

[hoang.nguyenhuy]

Thank you for your reply! It work now.

This is what I did:

- I send my students the invitation and Fusion 360 education license again. 

- I login my account in my students computer to check if it is the computer or just the account (it work)

- I have my student login his account in my computer (it also work)

- I have him setup everything he need for fusion on my computer

- I log out my account on his computer and have him log in his account again on his computer (it work now)