Show HN: SMS to Slack streamlines receiving 2FA codes for teams who share logins | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SMS to Slack streamlines receiving 2FA codes for teams who share logins

smstoslack.app

20 pointsgordalina13 comments

Is this a solution I can use when Gmail challenges a login and asks for a phone number? We often use a "user-company-name@our-company-name.com" convention, with a GSuite setup, that they share access to their Google Search Console and Analytics with so our team can access. But because we have team members across regions, they often get login challenges. How does this work with that?

Yes, this is a solution for gmail login challenges.

In the slack app you create a phone number, then you register that phone number with your google account. From now on any login challenge you receive on that phone number will be sent to slack.

If you have a team of multiple people, they would all be able too see and use that code if they triggered it.

This is much better than having to ask the person who's phone number is associated with the gmail account. As they may not answer in time.

It streamlines the process by putting a third party in the middle of the process and by sharing the “something you have” with an audience, making it even harder to know who actually did what.

For money.

SMS to Slack is not solving the providence problem of who triggered the 2FA flow (hasn't been an issue with customers), and it solves a problem for money - correct.

Very cool! Is there also a way for teammates to share authenticator-based 2FA codes? Seems like there's been a shift in the industry away from SMS for 2FA due to security concerns, most recently at Twitter: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2023/an-update...

Currently there is no way to share authenticator-based 2FA codes, happy to discuss further if this is an issue you'd like to be solved.

There is definitely a shift in the industry to move away from SMS for 2FA, but unfortunately people still use SMS and not all services support authenticator codes, which is still a problem.

We use 1Password, which supports one time password generation, and you can use shared vaults to share credentials.

Done this many years ago via Automate (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.a...) and an Android phone left alone in the office. Also useful as an internal pager via call redirects.

That's great!

SMS to Slack makes it easy for less technical folks to have a similar setup. Also cheaper than a monthly mobile service subscription.

That is subjective and region dependent.

$5 buys you a decent mobile subscription in Hungary (for this use-case). Setting up Automate is just graph editing. It is not much easier to add apps to Slack itself.

Wish you the best of luck with the service though, there may be a need for this by non-technical people or in other regions.

> $5 buys you a decent mobile subscription in Hungary (for this use-case). Setting up Automate is just graph editing. It is not much easier to add apps to Slack itself.

That's a good point! I was thinking about US-centric solutions.

Thank you for contributing to the conversation!

How does this work given that most virtual SMS providers can't receive a message from a short number?

This is compatible with many services, e.g.: Amazon, Google, Sendgrid. The one service that I know of that's not supported is TikTok.

I am working on adding support for a real phone number to solve for this shortcoming.

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