CloudFlare partners with Authy to implement two-factor authentication

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/11/28/cloudflare-partners-with-authy-for-two-factor-authentication/?fromcat=all

by danielpal • 14 years ago

52 46 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

jgrahamc4• 14 years ago

Details on how this works for CloudFlare customers: http://blog.cloudflare.com/2-factor-authentication-now-avail...

Also, Authy is a YC company with a nice solution.

Koldark• 14 years ago

Not against 2-factor, but now I have to install yet another application of questionable origin to trust my access to. Why not just use Google Authenticator?

rdl4• 14 years ago

"Google Authenticator" actually is any RFC 4226/6238 compatible HOTP/TOTP client, actually, including hardware dongles or phone apps or whatever.

I'm not sure if Authy is using the same protocol.

What really surprises me is that Twitter doesn't support any OTP solution; Twitter accounts getting hacked is a fairly common thing (@mat), and there's basically no solution to it now. Facebook doesn't use OTP but uses the information they have to do probably the best knowledge based authentication on the Internet (plus, shows IPs in use, and does geo-IP based fraud prevention, but Twitter doesn't really know anything secret about you. I've bugged Twitter people about this several times.

jgrahamc4• 14 years ago

Authy is based on the same standards.

gqdev• 14 years ago

Ah thats my problem .. only if authy can integrate and let us add what we already have on Google authenticator . i will dump Google auth.

danielpal8• 14 years ago

You will be very pleasently surprised very soon. We will support google authenticator and it'll be awesome...I can't wait to share - I wish apple was quicker approving apps - If you want a version sooner I can share via testflight if you wish, that way you can also help us make it better. E-mail me at d@authy.com and I'll make it happen.

zhuzhuor6• 14 years ago

I'm a little puzzled by the way authy works.

It seems to me the authy app refreshes a new code whenever I turn the screen off and on. I don't know how it syncs with the authentication server. The app must not only based on time ticks, like other 2-factor apps.

One way I thought is to notify the authentication server in background network requests. But I guess this isn't the case, because it won't work if you don't have network signal (you can try it in the airplane mode).

The other way I thought is the code must be self-verifiable. That means half of the code is a random number, and the other half is the real code computed based on the rand numb and some credentials. If it is really in this case the security strength is only half of the length of the code, i.e. 3.5 digits. That's not very safe to me, especially the website of authy itself only needs one code to log in (without any `first-factor` password).

Any thoughts?

jgrahamc4• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-time_Password_Al...

zhuzhuor6• 14 years ago

I don't think it is solely based on time. Did you read my comment carefully?

danielpal8• 14 years ago

It is based solely on time. The reason we refresh the time as you screen off and on is so that you always have 20 seconds ( I hate it when I open google authenticator and I have to wait for it to refresh).

We do some complex things to make sure time is always synced in the background. If you are in airplane mode obviously we can't contact the server. But if you do have connection, contact our server in the background and sync it. We also store the delta of how much was your time desynchronize so that next time you are in airplane mode we can do a good guess of how much your time might be off by, and then we use that. We don't expose this to the user, it should just "WORK"

zhuzhuor6• 14 years ago

Thanks for your explanations. I didn't get your details but I did more experiments. You may tell me if I am wrong.

1. If my phone has Internet connections, whenever the screen is turn on, the code is refreshed.

If the code is solely based on time, the app may sync its time tick with the server every time when it's turn on.

If the app sends its time to the server, the synced time value should also be encrypted and authenticated. The only pre-shared credential is the 6-digit pin sent by sms, which might be a little short.

If the app gets the time from the server, it might have a slight time delay before the code is computed and shown due to the network latency.

2. If my phone doesn't have Internet connections, the code is only refreshed in ~5s.

So I guess every 5s the app will generate a new code for the next 0~25s.

When the server wants to verify the received code it will check whether it matches with the codes generated in 0s, 5s, 10s, 15s and 20s.

So at least 5 different codes should work in the same time. This may be a nice way.

aioprisan• 14 years ago

ironic how the homepage shows a red lock icon (using resources over http) and their demo is completely on http://

danielpal8• 14 years ago

We don't transfer any resources over HTTP on www.authy.com, we even use HSTS on www.authy.com.

Demo is over http because it's not meant to be a secure site, only something you use to see how it works. Database is destroyed daily, but I agree we should change it to https.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

When sent an SMS from Authy (in the UK) the sender is listed as "BulkSMS", would be nice if it was "Authy" or something, I didn't recognise why I would have an SMS from that sender until I opened it.

Looking at the pricing, is there any explanation of what "Users" and "Auths" mean exactly, is that people that can authenticate with the application, or people that do every month? Not entirely sure.

danielpal8• 14 years ago

#1. We wish. We use around 14 different cellphone # to bypass Spam etc on SMS. Most people don't understand how hard is to reliably send SMS internationally (twilio makes it look easy in the US :))

2. Auth's are times you call the verify/token API. Since it's an API you can decide when exactly when to call it. Most our clients authenticate tokens every 14 - 30 days. So people can authentication to your app via username - password or cookies and then sometimes via username - password - token. We only count an Auth when they do username - password - token.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

I believe Twilio supports the UK.

Thanks for the clarification. Final question regarding the "large" plan, it lists "100,000+ Users" and "25,000+ Auth's/month", does the + mean there's no upper limit (with some degree of fair usage)?

eastdakota• 14 years ago

Here's a blog post on the decision process we went though to select Authy and, in particular, why we didn't use the Google Authenticator app:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/choosing-a-two-factor-authenticat...

csarva• 14 years ago

It's not very straightforward, but it does seem you can revoke the app via this page -

https://accounts.google.com/b/0/SmsAuthConfig

danielpal8• 14 years ago

This is something google specifically does. And it's not something you can really do if you loose your phone (i.e you need two-factor authentication to get there to disable two-factor authentication). Plus is not something that is centralized (if you have X accounts you have to go to all X accounts and disable them), and then you need to reconfigure all X accounts.

Honestly that's a lot of work. I've been using Google Authenticator for 2 years now with 7 accounts. Everytime I change phones (twice now) it's been a nightmare. Also since I travel, half the time they don't work.

I am going to build Google Auth support into Authy and it will be 10 times better that the Google Authenticator App....how I wish Google would do it, but they have abandoned Google Authenticator long time ago (they didn't even bother to support retina display's).

dguido• 14 years ago

Really happy you guys decided to finally implement two-factor auth! I had suggested this after the compromise you guys had a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4067190

I wassss kind of rooting for DUO Security (http://www.duosecurity.com/) to be the vendor you chose, but I guess you can't win them all. Do you think maybe you could work on login accounting and some alerting next? :-)

blibble• 14 years ago

this Authy service really misses the point: the numeric code is redundant when you have a separate secure device with an internet connection (i.e. a phone).

when the user logs in issue a push notification, which when tapped sends the code back automatically.

the numeric code can be used as a fallback if the net connection is down.

danielpal8• 14 years ago

We tried push notifications, but they were unreliable. (people disabled them, they were delayed etc, doesn't work with bad reception).

We're working on something better.

RobertLuand• 14 years ago

It's nice to see them start giving users a balance between security and user experience by implementing 2FA which allows us to telesign into our accounts. I know some will claim this make things more complicated, but the slight inconvenience each time you log in is worth the confidence of knowing your info is secure. I'm hoping that more companies start to offer this awesome functionality. This should be a prerequisite to any system that wants to promote itself as being secure.

CloudFlare partners with Authy to implement two-factor authentication

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