Ask HN: What's your backup plan for 2Factor authentication if you lose your phone | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your backup plan for 2Factor authentication if you lose your phone

20 pointsdsinecos15 comments

Gmail allows for code backups. What do you do for all the other services? What do you suggest for a small business team that uses multiple services with 2-factor authentication?

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EDIT - What do you do for services (For instance Namecheap) that do not provide backup codes or where Google Authenticator is not applicable?

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My wife's phone is my "backup phone", so both of us would have to lose our phones at the same time for there to be a problem.

Every time I add a 2FA to my phone I also add it to an encrypted password store on my SSH-server.

That way I can run `oathtool --totp -b $token` via SSH if I need to use it.

I keep paper keys for google and use authy.

I also use pass (https://www.passwordstore.org) and so I might start using this very new app https://github.com/felipelerena/passotp/

pass looks really awesome. How do you backup your GPG keys for pass though?

You can store them on an external device you use for backups, or you can print them on the good old paper :)

After loosing the key's once... I got a bit paranoid and set up a backup phone that stays at home. However lately i've started using enpass which allows me to sync the 2fa key's as well as the passwords.

Backup keys in 1Passwd for all 2FA enabled accounts except Amazon. However, I will disable 2FA from AMZ's main user and use an extremely long password instead to avoid having to deal with Amazon support, since they don't give backup codes...

I've noticed a lot of paper keys being used for backup keys. The three, off the top of my head, are github, keybase, and google, which offer paper keys which can be used to retrieve your password--even if your phone is lost.

Edit - What do you do for services (For instance Namecheap) that do not provide backup codes or where Google Authenticator is not applicable?

I store a printed version of the QR code in a safe place.

I use Google Authenticator as my 2FA solution. I manually downloaded Authenticator database from the phone and backed up on my external disk.

Same here, but with FreeOTP[1] instead.

Because apparently Math.pow doesn't work correctly on my device for some reason[2], and at that time there was no fix.

Although this method does require a rooted device, as I was unable to get adb backup to work.

[1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.fedorahost... [2] - https://github.com/google/google-authenticator-android/pull/...

I store backup keys in my wallet and my safe.

Authy

Authy, painless 2FA.

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