NimbleTOTP is a tiny library for Two-factor authentication (2FA) that allows developers to implement Time-Based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) for their applications.

two-factor-authentication-2fa

Two-factor authentication (2FA)

The concept of 2FA is quite simple. It's an extra layer of security that demands a user to provide two pieces of evidence (factors) to the authentication system before access can be granted.

One way to implement 2FA is to generate a random secret for the user and whenever the system needs to perform a critical action it will ask the user to enter a validation code. This validation code is a Time-Based One-Time Password (TOTP) based on the user's secret and can be provided by an authentication app like Google Authenticator or Authy, which should be previously installed and configured on a compatible device, e.g. a smartphone.

Note: A critical action can mean different things depending on the application. For instance, while in a banking system the login itself is already considered a critical action, in other systems a user may be allowed to log in using just the password and only when trying to update critical data (e.g. its profile) 2FA will be required.

using-nimbletotp

Using NimbleTOTP

In order to allow developers to implement 2FA, NimbleTOTP provides functions to:

• Generate secrets composed of random bytes.
• Generate URIs to be encoded in a QR Code.
• Generate Time-Based One-Time Passwords based on a secret.

generating-the-secret

Generating the secret

The first step to set up 2FA for a user is to generate (and later persist) its random secret. You can achieve that using NimbleTOTP.secret/1.

Example:

secret = NimbleTOTP.secret()
#=> <<178, 117, 46, 7, 172, 202, 108, 127, 186, 180, ...>>

By default, a binary with 20 random bytes is generated per the HOTP RFC.

generating-uris-for-qr-code

Generating URIs for QR Code

Before persisting the secret, you need to make sure the user has already configured the authentication app in a compatible device. The most common way to do that is to generate a QR Code that can be read by the app.

You can use NimbleTOTP.otpauth_uri/3 along with eqrcode to generate the QR code as SVG.

Example:

uri = NimbleTOTP.otpauth_uri("Acme:alice", secret, issuer: "Acme")
#=> "otpauth://totp/Acme:alice?secret=MFRGGZA&issuer=Acme"
uri |> EQRCode.encode() |> EQRCode.svg()
#=> "<?xml version=\\"1.0\\" standalone=\\"yes\\"?>\\n<svg version=\\"1.1\\" ...

generating-a-time-based-one-time-password

Generating a Time-Based One-Time Password

After successfully reading the QR Code, the app will start generating a different 6 digit code every 30s. You can compute the verification code with:

NimbleTOTP.verification_code(secret)
#=> "569777"

The code can be validated using the valid?/3 function. Example:

NimbleTOTP.valid?(secret, "569777")
#=> true

NimbleTOTP.valid?(secret, "012345")
#=> false

After validating the code, you can finally persist the user's secret so you use it later whenever you need to authorize any critical action using 2FA.

preventing-codes-from-being-reused

Preventing codes from being reused

The TOTP RFC requires that a code can only be used once. This is a security feature that prevents codes from being reused. To ensure codes are only considered valid if they have not been used, you need to keep track of the last time the user entered a TOTP code.

NimbleTOTP.valid?(user.totp_secret, code, since: user.last_totp_at)

Assuming the code itself is valid for the given secret, if since is nil, the code will be considered valid. If since is given, it will not allow codes in the same time period (30 seconds by default) to be reused. The user will have to wait for the next code to be generated.