TL;DR

I found out about the OATH Toolkit.

In recent post Two-factors authentication with OpenSSH I talked about setting 2FA using google-authenticator-libpam.

It now occurs to me that I didn’t mention or link that in my previous post. Ooops.

Afterwards, I discovered the OATH Toolkit and soon realized that it too has a PAM module. Here’s what I found so far:

• it seems that nobody cared to do a comparison between the two. Most tutorials I found around are sticking to google-authenticator-libpam but it might be that it’s for the same reason I also did that: I just found out about it much more easily. I’d love to see a comparison from people that used both and have the knowledge to say something about their experience.

• the OATH Toolkit is a… toolkit and this can be very useful to implement additional use cases. On the other hand it’s a… toolkit, so those additional use cases will have to be implemented, with all the associated risks of blowing up the result.

• en-passant, I also discovered that there are a couple of CPAN modules to help with OATH stuff… like App::OATH and Authen::OATH, which are worth investigating.

Well, there will be stuff to read… stay secure everybody!