If your account is frozen they should still be on the device. That would be a good time to change all your passkeys over to a yubikey, or to add one as a secondary token.
The keys being locked in a Secure Enclave is generally considered a feature, not a bug. That passkeys sync at all is somewhat concerning. I wouldn’t expect them to be exportable any time soon.
Apple also describes the keychain recovery process in depth (I think this is when you’ve lost all devices?): support.apple.com/guide/security/…/1
The Secure Enclave can apparently return the private key. For most keys it is encrypted with a key pair that is permanently stored in the Secure Enclave. For synchronized keys it is apparently encrypted with a key that is also stored in iCloud in such a way that Apple themselves cannot get to it.
It does sound like they could potentially enable exporting the passkeys, I think it’s unlikely they would because they provide a method to move them to other devices already and it does introduce more avenues for misuse. I don’t think it’s a huge requirement anyway, most hardware tokens provide no way to export at all by design. Apps that use them for 2FA should provide for enrolling multiple tokens.
As the other commenter said, only if you give them your phone number, and only through that garbage authy that does not use standard TOTP, but some proprietary crap, specifically made for twitch.
And if you give them a phone number, which another user will also try to use in the future, then the secret used for TOTP can change in any moment, which means if you exported the secret to e.g. Aegis and deleted that tracking filled garbage that is named authy, at one point the codes just won’t work anymore, and you’re practically locked out. Apparently support should be able to help, but they don’t give a single fuck.
First of all, that they are totally unnecessary for twitch to be able to provide 2fa authentication.
Other than that, their app has tracker components, all secret keys are stored in the cloud, who knows whether that’s encrypted, but on your phone’s storage surely not, if yours is rooted you can just view it in a file manager and copy it to a normal code generator app.
Generally they support standard TOTP code generation, but for twitch they are using some weird shit that generates 8 long numbers (instead of the standard 6), of which the middle 2 is the same so they drop one of them, and then also codes expire in third the time as it is normally.
Are they finally showing a proper QR code when setting it up?
At least that was the case for me. I removed 2FA to make the authy key invalid and activated it again. and they do the normal TOTP setup stuff during setup
That sounds good. I still have a working login somehow, but unfortunately I can’t disable authy, because they want a code to do that, and they won’t accept those that I have, even though it was working when I have set it up.
I don’t. Not sure whether they even provided those when I have set it up, maybe they thought that since it’s stored online you can’t just lose it, but I really don’t remember whether there was any I could have saved. It way years ago.
Also, thinking about it, the prompt does not give an option to use a recovery code, but only to try with the phone number (which is dead by now), or contact support.
tbf, that’s a bit on you. The whole point of 2FA is to prove that you are you. and if you completely killed that factor without deactivating it first or having a backup in any way, I can see the support not doing much. I’d be pissed if someone could just contact support and deactivate my 2FA method
I didn’t enable it because I wanted it for security, but because twitch required it. And then I have set it up with TOTP for security while I was doing it, which does not work anymore either. Also, I did not kill the phone number, it is a public phone number that doesn’t receive messages anymore. And if you blame me for not wanting to give up my own phone number, I don’t know that to tell you. My privacy matters much more than caring about the possibility that someone finds out my 30 long random password and catches the SMS code from the website where they were shown.
I can see the support not doing much. I’d be pissed if someone could just contact support and deactivate my 2FA method
The 2FA prompt itself tells to contact support in cases like this.
Other than that, email verification is perfectly fine for verifying that it’s me. The address was never changed. Actually, as I have seen in a friend’s account they are using email already as 2FA for logins, if you don’t have any other way set up, maybe for other functions too.
Before I deleted my accounts there, I remember twitter and facebook deactivated your account for “suspicious activity” if you did not provide a phone number when making it, and the only way to reactivate it was to give them your phone number.
While you are adding this anyway consider using an open source app instead of google auth like aegis. There are many others but I wish I knew about them sooner.
Bitwarden crew checking in. The best thing about bitwarden is the 10$/year to have a pro account. It gives you, amongst other things the ability to store up to 1tb of attachments and reports on various risk assessments.
It weakens it a bit, but in my opinion it still has strength where it counts. If an attacker gets access to your password outside your password manager (man-in-the-middle, keylogger, phishing), then you’re still protected. Maybe it’s hubris in my own ability to keep my password manager safe, but I’ve never been worried about storing MFA in my password manager.
Printing recovery codes would require me to either be price gouged by the printer ink cartel or use someone else’s printer, and using someone else’s printer is begging to get my account stolen.
I have no idea how to hammer things into metal plates, but I’m guessing that’s even more expensive than printer ink.
I can do that with alphanumeric codes, yeah, but can I get alphanumeric codes from GitHub, or is it going to be a QR code? I can’t write down a QR code…
QR codes are just an encoding. Just use any half-competent QR code app, and it will give you it’s content, which you can then write down. For the reverse you can use any QR code generator.
Okay, so generally the way it works is you have some app (e.g. Google Authenticator, 1password, Aegis, Bit warden – anything that supports TOTP). When you enable 2FA for a site, it’ll give you a QR code. You scan that with your app and then the app gives you a six digit code that changes every 30 seconds.
The QR code is really just an easy way to get a long string of characters into your app, though, and if the QR code doesn’t work there should be an option to see the raw code and manually enter it.
You enter that code in once to confirm that you have actually set up the 2FA. Then it will show you a list of recovery codes. It’ll only show you these once; it doesn’t store them anywhere. You need to note them down in whatever way suits you best (I print mine; you could also just write them down). You cannot see these again. The best you can do, if you still have access to your account, is generate new ones (probably by disabling and re-enabling 2FA)
Now, whenever you login, you’ll be asked for your authenticator code (much like an SMS). You just open whatever app you used and enter in whatever code it’s currently showing (remember it’s time based).
If your authenticator app gets messed up somehow, you can recover it using your recovery codes.
Yeah. GitHub makes sense because most users are writing code that can be executed by others. That makes GitHub accounts security critical.
But a Lemmy account? Naw, you lose almost nothing if that gets compromised. A little bit of history and subscriptions, mostly.
I’m in a discord that for some reason “requires” 2FA. Based on searching, I think they give everyone some kinda admin role or something? It doesn’t actually require 2FA, but it shows a very annoying warning that covers up a bunch of the channel selection screen. But despite that, I don’t really wanna deal with the hassle of 2FA on a chat app that’s basically consequence free for me if it gets exploited.
Specifically app-based 2FA, ideally Google Authenticator based. There are tons of great authenticator apps available that are all compatible, so it should absolutely be preferred over SMS or email.
No offense to companies but I'm honestly sick of companies forcing 2fa. Every single one seems to have a different shitty way of doing it. Like why on earth do I need two different authenticator apps on my phone (authy&google authenticator)? Some do sms/phone number, but then yell at you and prevent you from doing 2fa if you have a "bad phone number". This happened on discord where I'm locked out of certain servers because I can't do phone verification, and I can't do it because discord doesn't like my phone number. Twitter was the same way for a long while (couldn't do 2fa/phone verification due to them not liking my number).
From the article it sounds like they're doing authenticator app or sms. I'm guessing sms won't work for me, so app it is. I decided to dig to see which authenticator app they use and they list: 1password, authy, lastpass, and microsoft.... no google?
Honestly, even email requirements for accounts is annoying because you know it just ends up spamming you. is the future where we're gonna have to have 30 different authenticator apps on our phone?
Oh noes, 2 different authenticators? Between my two jobs I need: Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Duo, CyberArk, Okta, Impriviata, and I must have LastPass for password management. Everyone demands their particular flavor of security. Not to mention I have to login to all of these 40 something accounts every 29 days so they don’t expire. Please, someone just everyone switch to a password-free security system like Microsoft Authenticator has and let’s just get rid of the song and dance of picking a new password all the time.
You might want to migrate away from LastPass. And change every account password. They were hacked horribly and the only thing standing between your encrypted passwords and hackers is time.
there's quite a lot of services that want phone for verification/2fa/whatever. whenever I run into them I usually just refuse to use the service altogether.
BTW, any authenticator app works when it tells you to use one. They all use a standard, so it doesn’t matter which one you use.
Eh, it’s a little more nuanced than that, there’re more standards for MFA code generation than just TOTP.
And even within the TOTP standard, there are options to adjust the code generation (timing, hash algorithm, # of characters in the generated code, etc.) that not all clients are going to support or will be user-configureable. Blizzard’s Battle.net MFA is a good example of that.
If the code is just your basic 6-digit HMAC/SHA1 30-second code, yeah, odds are almost 100% that your client of choice will support it, but anything other than that I wouldn’t automatically assume that it’s going to work.
Google Auth works just fine. The standard for app generated 2FA is, well, standard. They’re only listing a non-complete list of options for people that don’t know what an authenticator app is and need to get one for the first time.
Mostly. The 6 digit standard ones that you see almost everywhere are standard TOTP codes and most apps work for them. There are some proprietary things out there too but you typically see those with a matching app from the same company. Those are far less common though so for practical reasons you can assume they are all interchangeable.
Those values are computed separately what the app is really storing is just the input values which are then combines with the current time to create the 6 digit code. That means that keeping that input value (seed) safe is a big deal, and how and where that is done is one of the major differentiators between the various options.
Like why on earth do I need two different authenticator apps on my phone (authy&google authenticator)?
you… don’t?
Both of these implement exactly the same protocol (TOTP). Used authy for all my Top Of The Pops Time-based one-time password needs exclusively, before moving everything to bitwarden
Well the good news for you is that a website specifying one or the other is nothing more than marketing from that app maker! So long as there is a QR code (or a long random-ish string), you can use any authenticator app that supports that website’s 2FA algorithms!
That last bit is important because I think Lemmy had a non-standard 2FA algorithm (SHA-256?) that wouldn’t work with Google Authenticator.
Lemmy works with Google Authenticator, but not with Authy.
Annoyingly Authy fails silently and ignores the part of the code that specifies SHA-256 and just generates a SHA-1 code that won’t work with no warning or indication to the user.
Unfortunately there are some websites that require Authy (probably because Authy wined and dined some business executive). I absolutely loathe these sites but if it’s a site you’re not willing to live without, you’re stuck with having Authy plus your main 2FA app.
which ones are that? I’d love to check, because afaik, they have a feature that enables push-2fa via authy, but should generally work on other apps as well
Sendgrid’s only options for 2FA are Authy (their proprietary token generation, no option for TOTP) or SMS. Tried signing up the other day and was surprised to find no option to use standard TOTP.
Are you sure that you can’t use a different TOTP generator? There’s a difference between telling you to use Authy and still being able to use a different app
Yes I’m sure, hence why I specifically mentioned that. Try the sign up procedure yourself. It REQUIRES 2fa and it has to be Authy’s non-standard token or SMS. No option for regular TOTP.
thx. just making sure. I already saw a lot of people annoyed about a specific app, just because that was the one being advertised, but in the end it was TOTP
The reason they want a phone number is, that it’s a relatively cheap way to ensure people not signing up bots galore, as getting phone numbers en masse is a lot harder than getting email accounts
phone numbers are typically tied to your name/identity, and phone companies can locate you using their towers and such. Giving a company your phone number is identical to giving a company your full legal name and address.
yeah, no idea why you’re getting downvoted, it’s clear why companies are so eagerly embracing and requiring 2FA – if the benefits were only for the consumers, it wouldn’t be mandated anywhere near this quickly. but when they know they get a real human phone tied to every account, that’s a huge motivation
At least you should be able to use your local password manager as well if you don’t care about keeping your 2fa on separate hardware. KeePass 2, KeePassXC, Bitwarden, …
Too many people were making poor choices. When there’s an incident of an account that should have been secured but wasn’t getting compromised, that’s bad for the platform, ecosystem, and community. This is just another level beyond not allowing you to set a password of “password”
Bitwarden has 2FA (for paid tier, like $10/year). I don’t consider it “real” 2FA, but it’s more secure than just a password, and super quick to copy code using browser addon. Useful for certain sites, that don’t stay logged in, require every time, etc.
Though people that have authority over important projects should have proper security, considering how large the internet is, with how many individual parts, the chance of someone being in charge of a large and important project - may it be a browser, compiler/interpreter, utility, library etc. is not even close to zero.
So if a (co-)maintainer of a project included as standard utility in Linux Servers, let’s say bash for example, is somehow breached, the attacker could push and force merge a malicious obfuscated commit, maybe even with normal content included. As it’s from a reputable source, it’s not going to be checked as thoroughly as commits from other people. One hour later, every Arch system, desktop and server, has a trojan. Four hours later also all Gentoo systems (got to compile it first). 2 years weeks later regularly updated debian servers now contain malware. A chain of events, fragile to being detected by people monitoring their own activity, other maintainers activity and people reading the source - eg. for security reasons -, but yet, not that unlikely considering the amount of packages present even in a standard install, and needed as dependencies for typical server packages.
I don’t like how a lot of things require their own custom app, especially when there’s no automatic notification. I need to try and remember what the app is called, open it, navigate through, then approve it
I like the app setup rather than shoving everything into a browser. But I'm not a fan of this 2fa stuff. I get the point is security, but let me decide which app/method to use, and whether I want to use it at all. Otherwise it's just annoying.
I’m absolutely a fan of choosing which method to use, and also a fan of requiring choosing one. I prefer Google Authenticator-style 2FA (I use Aegis, but there are plenty of options), and I get annoyed when I need something else (e.g. Fidelity only offers Symantec, Steam only offers Steam Guard, etc).
In the end if it doesn’t work for your security model, than more power to you. But if it helps to increase the security of the average Joe, it’s good advice.
1password does this, too and it’s magical. I’ve had my SMS go to my browser via Google Messages for a while, but it’s so much easier to just auto-fill it instead of copy/paste
This! Authy is very very nice. Syncing accounts is a life saver, both as backup, and not having to pick up the phone all the time.
Cut and pasting with a click instead of reading and typing, is so much faster.
Easily search the very long list of entries.
Not open source tho, but free as in beer.
If Aegis had the sync option, i would have used that. But it did not last time i checked.
…through a third-party cloud server that you have no good reason to trust. No bueno. Keep sensitive information off the cloud unless you want it to become public.
yup, that’s the tradeoff, this or reaching for your procrastinating device, but yeah, maybe Bitwarden could be better alternative, now i’m too lazy to migrate + it’s paid
You can use KeePassXC to generate the TOTP codes on your PC. With the browser plugin, you can generate the code and fill the textbox with one click when the password database is unlocked.
Sites that don’t use standard TOTP for 2FA are a pain in the ass though.
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