Now then; what is "2FA", for those of you who don't know?
"2FA" is an acronym for two factor authentication, which is commonly promoted these days as a far better way of securing online accounts.
The old way of securing any online account is to use a password, of course. There are a number of 'password managers' about which will either store, and manage, your own choice of passwords, or upon request will generate totally random passwords for you, and then save this information for each site.
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Two-factor authentication not only makes use of the traditional password, it goes one step further and makes use of a randomly-generated 6-digit numerical code as a second step, before allowing access to your account.
Very often these 2FA 'tokens', as they're known, come in the form of a QRcode.....the modern, tech equivalent of the traditional bar-code. Usually, apps which can 'scan' & 'read' these codes are installed to your smartphone, since 90% of the world now uses one, and these things can be read by the phone's built-in camera.
BUT:- What if you're an old fart like me, who believes that a phone is for making & receiving calls, and perhaps text messages.....and nothing else? I don't want to browse t'internet while I'm out & about. I don't want to play games, stream movies, listen to music, take pictures even.....or avail myself of GPS technology to find out just how badly I'm lost..!. Etc, etc....
(I can already hear some of you muttering, "Get with the program, ya silly old git..." Hey! it's a personal choice. I already have bad enough eyesight that I have no need to compound the problem by squinting at a screen only a few inches across all day long!)
And then there are those who really have no access to modern technology; can't afford a smartphone, and perhaps only have access to 15-20 yr-old hardware, without even a webcam or any 'modern' features. Well, my friends; OTPclient is very definitely for you.
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If you can install this, and can take a screenshot that you can save as a PNG file.....you're all set.
Any site offering 2FA will invariably do so as a QRcode these days. Normally you'd have to scan this, then use an in-phone app to generate this numerical code from it, but.....not now. Just take a screenshot of the QRcode (only the square of the code itself; you don't really want several inches of desktop/website showing round the outside....this won't help matters!), followed by saving it as a PNG file. When adding a new token from the 'actions' menu, top left corner, simply select 'Using a QR code->From file'. The client will 'read' the QRcode internally from the PNG image file, and your token will appear in the GUI.
You also get options to scan via webcam (awkward if your cam is built-in to the screen!), or to enter the code manually. Some sites may offer this option. Many don't.
When you need to generate a 6-digit numerical 2FA code from it, simply click on the item you need in the GUI list. It'll highlight, a code is auto-generated, and automatically copied to your clipboard, ready for pasting wherever it needs to go.
Very neat, extremely lightweight, and incredibly simple to use. Couldn't be easier.
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This usually comes as a Canonical PPA repository item. I learnt the trick, years ago, of how to navigate the Launchpad website and extract the individual packages from these PPAs.....and this is what I've done here.
I've built packages for the two 64-bit 'flagship' Pups, Bionicpup64 & Xenialpup64.....and a 32-bit package for radky's DPup 'Stretch', making use of 32-bit Xenial components. It was an educated guess that this would work; I've used several Xenialpup packages in Stretch and vice-versa, since they both use the 2.23 glibc & associated deps, etc.
As installed from the PPA, the PPM should also pull in libzbar. This is the item that makes the 'magic' happen, since it permits reading of bar- & QR codes. I've added this item into the packages already, and these will fire straight-up in a pristine, 'clean' Puppy.
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If anybody's interested, you can find the packages at my Google drive. Either click the link in my sig & look for the 'OTPclient' directory, or you access them direct, here:-
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Navigate through and help yourselves to the one you want. Hope some of you find these useful.
Enjoy.
Mike.
