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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Authy gets this right. Not sure why anyone would trust Google with their 2FA secrets.

Authy has custom derivation time and makes it very difficult to export keys for use elsewhere.

I will only use 2fa applications that do standard 30 second TOTP. Bonus points if it can set custom times and hash algos. A good application like this is Aegis Authenticator for mobile.

How exactly?

I guess the person meant this: encrypt-than-upload of backups with backup passkey managed by yourself, details e.g. in this blogpost: https://authy.com/blog/how-the-authy-two-factor-backups-work...

I suspect the vast majority of Authy backups use passwords trivially susceptible to brute-force attacks despite only 1000 (!!!) iterations of PBKDF2. If Authy wanted to do things right, it would generate local encryption keys instead of asking normies for file encryption passphrases.

argon2/scrypt with significantly larger costs sound like the right fix. Asymmetric crypto can make backing up still cheap, who cares if restoring takes 30 seconds.

That would be a great improvement for technical users. But also consider that the target for Authy is the average mobile user. I’m not unconvinced that the typical backup password looks like S3cr3tP@s$w0rd, which no amount of key stretching will fix.

Yes. What I meant was that Authy does encrypted backups. You can criticize how it's implemented, but it's there, it works, and your 2FA secrets aren't just sitting in the cloud.

I think I'll refrain from posting on topics about Google — clearly there is a huge pro-Google sentiment among HN readers and anything detracting from that gets instantly downvoted.

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