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hpr3784 :: Two factor authentication without a phone number

Diving into privacy-aware and offline methods to generate one time passwords

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Hosted by Celeste on Thursday 2023-02-02 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.
Tags: 2FA, OTP, TOTP, HOTP, security.
Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. | Comments (1)

Part of the series: Privacy and Security

In this open series, you can contribute shows that are on the topic of Privacy and Security

Many services implement 2FA (Two factor authentication) by sending you a OTP (One Time Password) using an SMS with a random code, but this forces you to give them your valuable phone number. What alternatives do exist?

Let's dive into the HOTP, used by some banks years ago through a physical token and the recent TOTP, which both let you generate completely offline codes without using any phone number or any other personal detail. They use the HMAC technique usually with a SHA-1 one-way hashing function, but other hashing functions can be used too.

Useful links:

  • a little visual explanation I found here
  • Aegis android OTP generator
  • use TOTP in KeepassXC for a desktop generator guide

Let's keep Webauthn maybe for a future episode, I'm still exploring it and have to do more research.

Show Transcript

Automatically generated using whisper

whisper --model tiny --language en hpr3784.wav


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Comment #1 posted on 2023-02-07T21:22:10Z by Zen_floater2

Thank you for making this podcast

I found your version of two factor authorization interesting and would love it if more companies implemented common sense rather than marketing.

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