Few days of work, and almost a month of waiting. It was totally worth it. Yesterday noon, CakeDC community upgraded one of its major plugins with our Qobo patch. It allows users to enable Google Authenticator. There’s no need anymore to use ‘dev-develop’ branches in composer.
Google Authenticator gets a new wave of interest from the web community, trying to put an extra layer on top of user authentication process. There’s a plethora of plugins and components that let you authenticate with Google, but most of them aim to OAuth and Google+ integration. Two-step auth gets aside. I took few hours on research for the simple 2FA library available on the net and found TwoFactorAuth that already support Google URI QR-codes, that can be easily embedded into any framework/application running on PHP....
I stumbled upon these little facts, why engineers chose Base32 over Base64 for shared secret key: The resulting character set is all one case, beneficial when using a case-insensitive filesystem, spoken language, or human memory. The Base32 result can be used as a file name because it can not possibly contain the '/' symbol, which is the Unix path separator. To avoid similar-looking pairs of different symbols they picked an alphabet , so the strings can be accurately transcribed by hand....