Switching TOTP providers from Authy to andOTP

Since I first started using 2-factor authentication with TOTP (Time based One Time Passwords), I've been using Authy to store my TOTP secrets. This has worked well for a number of years, but recently I decided that I wanted to change. This was for a number of reasons:

1. I've acquired a large number of TOTP secrets for various websites and services, and I'd like a better way of sorting the list
2. Most of the web services I have TOTP secrets for don't have an icon in Authy - and there are only so many times you can repeat the 6 generic colours before it becomes totally confusing
3. I'd like the backups of my TOTP secrets to be completely self-hosted (i.e. completely on my own infrastructure)

After asking on Reddit, I received a recommendation to use andOTP (F-Droid, Google Play). After installing it, I realised that I needed to export my TOTP secrets from Authy first.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this isn't an easy process. Many guides tell you to alter the code behind the official Authy Chrome app - and since I don't have Chrome installed (I'm a Firefox user :D), that's not particularly helpful.

Thankfully, all is not lost. During my research I found the authy project on GitHub, which is a command-line app - written in Go - temporarily registers as a 'TOTP provider' with Authy and then exports all of your TOTP secrets to a standard text file of URIs.

These can then be imported into whatever TOTP-supporting authenticator app you like. Personally, I did this by generating QR codes for each URI and scanning them into my phone. The URIs generated, when converted to a QR code, are actually in the same format that they were originally when you scan them in the first place on the original website. This makes for an easy time importing them - at least from a walled garden.

Generating all those QR codes manually isn't much fun though, so I automated the process. This was pretty simple:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
exec 3<&0; # Copy stdin
while read url; do
    echo "${url}" | qr --error-correction=H;
    read -p "Press a enter to continue" <&3; # Pipe in stdin, since we override it with the read loop
done <secrets.txt;

The exec 3<&0 bit copies the standard input to file descriptor 3 for later. Then we enter a while loop, and read in the file that contains the secrets and iterate over it.

For each line, we convert it to a QR code that displays in the terminal with VT-100 ANSI escape codes with the Python program qr.

Finally, after generating each QR code we pause for a moment until we press the enter key, so that we can generate the QR codes 1 at a time. We pipe in file descriptor 3 here that we copied earlier, because inside the while loop the standard input is the file we're reading line-by-line and not the keyboard input.

With my secrets migrated, I set to work changing the labels, images, and tags for each of them. I'm impressed by the number of different icons it supports - and since it's open-source if there's one I really want that it doesn't have, I'm sure I can open a PR to add it. It also encrypts the TOTP secrets database at rest on disk, which is pretty great.

Lastly came the backups. It looks like andOTP is pretty flexible when it comes to backups - supporting plain text files as well as various forms of encrypted file. I opted for the latter, with GPG encryption instead of a password or PIN. I'm sure it'll come back to bite me later when I struggle to decrypt the database in an emergency because I find the gpg CLI terribly difficult to use - perhaps I should take multiple backups encrypted with long and difficult password too.

To encrypt the backups with GPG, you need to have a GPG provider installed on your phone. It recommended that I install OpenKeychain for managing my GPG private keys on Android, which I did. So far, it seems to be functioning as expected too - additionally providing me with a mechanism by which I can encrypt and decrypt files easily and perform other GPG-related tasks...... if only it was this easy in the Linux terminal!

Once setup, I saved my encrypted backups directly to my Nextcloud instance, since it turns out that in Android 10 (or maybe before? I'm not sure) it appears that if you have the Nextcloud app installed it appears as a file system provider when saving things. I'm certainly not complaining!

While I'm still experimenting with my new setup, I'm pretty happy with it at the moment. I'm still considering how I can make my TOTP backups even more secure while not compromising the '2nd factor' nature of the thing, so it's possible I might post again in the future about that.

Next on my security / privacy todo list is to configure my Keepass database to use my Solo for authentication, and possibly figure out how I can get my phone to pretend to be a keyboard to input passwords into machines I don't have my password database configured on :D

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