7 ms·
Ask HN: How many 2FA tokens do you have?
I currently have 43 TOTP tokens in an app.
That feels like a lot, and is starting to get unmanageable.
I also have a handful of services tied to a Yubikey. But I've no way of knowing how many.
So, how many do you have?
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago27 Unrelated but no joke I have something like 600-700 accounts stored in LastPass
- anotherhue 5y agoI've used lastpass, Keepass, 1password (which can store TOTP codes) but I've moved entirely to a Mooltipass. Easy to backup, less fuss all around. (It does TOTP). Open hardware. https://www.mymooltipass.com/ https://www.mymooltipass.com/
- Klaster_1 5y agoOnly a single Yubikey. After the purchase, I expected lots of service to implement WebAuthn, but none that I use bothered to, except for select few. I touch it once a year at best.
- cpach 5y ago12.
- smoyer 5y agoI have three Yubikeys that I use for TOTP and that house my GPG keys and SSH key. At any given time, I have one on my person, one in my home office and one off-site. I only use TOTP on the Yubikeys for "critical accounts" and use oathtool and password-store to perform TOTP for most accounts (in Firefox via passff). Password-store features git push and pull so I keep my encrypted passwords and TOTP keys on a couple remote Git servers. Because I use passwords that I don't know for every service, the Yubikeys are really more about being a safe way to back-up and transport my encryption key. If I've got that, I can always decrypt my passwords.
- edent 5y agoHow do you sync the Yubikeys if they're in different locations? Like, if you're at work and sign up to a new service - how do the other two get associated? Sorry if that's an obvious question.
- smoyer 5y agoI do rotate which key is off-site. For the "critical sites" this means I've only got two keys registered for some period of time. I don't use the TOTP on the Yubikeys for most sites so signing up for a new service involves generating a new TOTP key with oathtool and saving that in password-store (along with the URL and login name) when I generate the password.
- kdtsh 5y agoThis sounds like a neat arrangement. How do you go about this when you’re on the go? - do you have an app on your phone which support unlocking your password-store using a smart card, or do you just not manage passwords/MFA except on your computer?
- smoyer 5y agoEach of my phones has its own private key and can decrypt the stored passwords. Having a private key protected only by a six number passcode is obviously a weak point in my security. Since password-store is encrypting each password with seven or eight public keys, it's relatively easy to revoke a compromised key and to re-encrypt all passwords/TOTP keys (excluding the compromised key). I mostly generate passwords and add entries to my password manager from a computer but I've got all the required public keys on each device so it's theoretically possible to manipulate the password-store from a phone or tablet as well.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago4 in Google Authenticator and 21 in Authy, 1 of which may have been superseded. One service I use has four separate 2FA tokens to use with different service functions, and I have one account for me and one for my wife, so that single service accounts for 8 of 21 Authy tokens.
- danesparza 5y ago29 in an app. I use Keepass heavily for password storage.
- jwr 5y agoTwo Yubikeys (you always want to have two) and 28 TOTP tokens. I wish more services would support Webauthn.
- captn3m0 5y ago35 in my main 2FA app (Tofu), and 4 Yubikeys configured as U2F in 6-8ish accounts. I also have a few TOTPs in one of the Yubikeys (which has a limit of 32).
- account-5 5y agoI have none. I use keepassxc to manage all my accounts. I try to avoid 2FA. I have other strategies around account compromise.
- _wldu 5y agoRelevant blog post: https://www.go350.com/posts/now-they-have-2fa-problems/ https://www.go350.com/posts/now-they-have-2fa-problems/
- Ideabile 5y agoThere is only one real answer to this: too many.
- laurent92 5y agoWhy can’t websites show a QR code that my TOTP app recognizes and validates?
- tialaramex 5y agoYou're going to need to explain a little more of your idea. What does this QR code do? What happens if I put the Google.com QR code on my web site? What does your TOTP app do with this QR code when it sees one? Stuff like that.
- firecall 5y ago61 2FA tokens! More via phone number 2FA as well! And a lot of passwords saved.... my app doesn't give me a count. Probably need to look on desktop :-)
- ur-whale 5y ago11 I manage them with this: https://github.com/pcarrier/gauth https://github.com/pcarrier/gauth
- cr3ative 5y ago45 or so. But - they're all in 1Password, so the management is done for me. I don't have to scroll to a particular entry, it autofills everywhere I have to use them. I also have a handful of yubikeys for more secure things.
- rwieruch 5y agoDoes it make sense to have passwords and OTPs at a space with the same attack vector?
- mmxcz 5y agoYes. It's not 2FA anymore but it still protects you when your password gets leaked.
- wasmitnetzen 5y agoThat's not 2FA anymore though, if you regular password is also stored there.
- trulyrandom 5y ago71 in total. I store all tokens in Aegis and have automatic backups configured, so I don't find it to be too unmanageable. It's seem like a lot, but then again I also have hundreds accounts in my password manager at this point.
- msoad 5y agoWide Web Authn[1] adoption can't come soon enough! This is so stupid! All I need is a single private key to login to all the websites! I personally like to keep it in my iCloud account because I don't trust myself with keeping a private key for too long. [1] https://webauthn.io https://webauthn.io
- dorianmariefr 5y agoOTP is much simpler, I still don't know how I will be able to implement Webauthn for rubygems on the command line
- msoad 5y agofor command line stuff you should be using public key actually
- dorianmariefr 5y agoWebauthn works with public keys, but how can I get the public key of the Touch ID sensor and actually I would need the private key to sign the challenge
- tialaramex 5y agoWhat is "rubygems on the command line" ? From the replies it sounds like this is talking about client software? An unattended client should not be able to do WebAuthn as the whole point is that a human is present and authorising the authentication step - this is part of its defence against remote attackers, if I have 100% full of Bob's device I still can't touch the sensor or button to authenticate as Bob. However, if you mean the human is present and running command line apps, that's fine, definitely possible. The authenticator is typically a USB device, it speaks HID (like a USB keyboard or mouse) but a specific custom HID protocol for this purpose, you can get a library to help talk to it, and that's how OpenSSH works with Yubikeys. Now, OpenSSH is specifically telling the authenticator "I'm SSH, not the Web" but for "Rubygems on the command line" you could choose either to say "I'm a web browser" or, you could say "I'm this custom rubygems on the command line thing" and that gets you public key signed messages that are unique to your thing, verifiable by a remote system as not "WebAuthn" but "Custom rubygem thing". Apple and Google (for the Android ecosystem) actually do all this today for phones, if you use a Web browser you get WebAuthn, but from a normal phone app you can do the exact same Usernameless/ Passwordless login like WebAuthn, but using a custom per-app message that can't be impersonated by other apps on the same phone.
- simonbarker87 5y agoRelated: anyone have a good 2FA backup solution? Like if I loose my phone at this point I’d be pretty stuffed as my Google Auth app would be gone and my text 2FA also gone in the same moment.
- habibur 5y agoThis. I am pretty scared of losing my phone too. Reinstalling the app didn't seem to revive the tokens, last time I tried.
- simonbarker87 5y agoYeh, 2FA through an authenticator app feels so fragile for the consequences of something going wrong.
- refurb 5y agoAnd as far as I know you can only have one device enabled with Google Authenticator at a time? If it could be on multiple devices then I could set up an old phone and have it as a backup. Edit: I’m wrong. You can sync two Authenticator apps using the same QR code during setup.
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoYou can export Google Auth tokens and reimport them on a separate device. Authy seems to sync between the 2 devices I have with it installed (which indicates that it's stored "in the cloud"). I always have second device mirroring the important stuff on my primary device. Usually my most recently replaced phone.
- simonbarker87 5y agoAs I was typing the question I thought “I guess my old phone could do the job?” I’m wondering there is a middle ground option.
- ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 5y ago
- frizlab 5y agoI have 76 (mix of perso and work accounts ~50/50)
- sshine 5y ago12 Mostly cloud services, version control, email.
- yesenadam 5y agoNone. I think - I don't know what they are exactly.
- toastal 5y agoI have 24 keys in andOTP. I have the backed up with password-store and the OTP plugin. I also have my most frequently used ones on profiles in my hardware OnlyKey which can support FIDO2, TOTP, Yubikey's special format, text passwords and more. I have 2 of these keys, the other in a fire safe. I'm not really concerned with losing a single device because of redundancy. The things I hate about the 2FA process: 1) requiring a phone number, especially only having SMS for 2FA like my foreign bank (I've reported the issue with SIM swapping with them on support and in person, but considering their system still isn't UTF using a very old encoding so I can't even type a comma in a message without errors, I'm not holding my breath) 2) not offering WebAuthn, especially as a big firm 3) Supporting specifically Yubikey and not FIDO2/WebAuthn 4) using some bullshit closed-source wrapper around TOTP like Symantec VIP that doesn't have a Linux client and requires me to use some random Python script to get spoof a Mac system to get a code (thanks Schwab)
- synthos 5y agoIs this the Symantec script you're referring to? https://github.com/dlenski/python-vipaccess https://github.com/dlenski/python-vipaccess Once you follow those steps you can generate codes from any TOTP system (Yubi, Android, etc).
- toastal 5y agoYes, but it says that it's brittle because it needs to spoof a specific Mac UA and this is not the most user-friendly process—especially for a newbie that switched to Linux and isn't used to the terminal and Python, but wants account security. I emailed support to just use TOTP because this step is dumb. If Symantic wants to see TOTP as a service that's fine, I guess, but I just picture an astronaut with a gun saying it was just TOTP the whole time. Meanwhile they try to sell hardware keys around the obscurity layer of their product.
- JohnFen 5y agoNone. Well, two, technically, but I'd lost them long ago.
- Thristle 5y ago4 for work 10 personal They are getting a bit hard to handle mostly because my app (authy) doesn't have a good enough set of icons
- spansoa 5y agoDid you backup the 'seed' QR-CODE somewhere safe? If you lose access to Google Authenticator, you lose the ability to use OTP for access.