Dealing with the demise of authy desktop.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com
a reader informed me recently
that the parent company of authy, Twilio, has announced that they are discontinuing
support for the desktop version of the authy
Google Authenticator compatible two-factor authentication program.
So I've recommended authy as a great way to basically have your two-factor
authentication codes available on multiple devices,
and it will still continue to be a good solution for that as long as those devices
are only mobile devices, like your smartphone or an iPad or whatever.
But if you're running Windows or Mac,
and I think even Linux, they are no longer going to support their
application been running on those platforms.
That's disappointing because that's where I actually use it the most.
I have off the on my Windows desktop
here, and when I need a two-factor code, that's where I go to.
The reason authy is so useful, of course, is not only because it's on the desktop,
but because I have it installed on multiple devices.
So I get the same two-factor codes
from my Windows desktop, from my laptop, from my phone, from my Mac.
You You get the idea.
Being able to have your two-factor codes in more than one place is actually really
cool so that in case you lose one of your two-factor devices,
you have other two-factor devices that will still have those same codes.
However, Othie is removing the desktop.
I use the desktop.
What am I going to do?
As it turns out, the answer was staring me in the face since sometime last year.
The The trick, if you want to call it that, is that the password manager I
use, 1Password, can also be my two-factor authentication.
I will show you what that means, and I'm going to show you how to convert
from one two-factor authentication tool to another.
Let's head over to Windows and my test Google account.
You can see here I'm signed in on the the left-hand side on a Google account.
This is the AskLeo test Google account.
On the right-hand side, I'm running the 1Password password vault.
It's a standalone application you can download for Windows if you like.
I believe we can do everything you want
to if you want to use the browser extension instead.
But I'm going to keep it as a separate window in a separate application because
it'll make a few things a little bit clearer as we go through this process.
So Like I said, this is a Google account
and it has two-factor authentication enabled.
I'm going to go to Security in that Google account.
Now we can scroll down here and we'll see
that two-step verification is on and we've got authenticator as one of the options.
Now, realize I have signed into the account, the only way that I can
do what I'm about to do is to have successfully signed into the account,
which at this point, since this is an emergency privacy
situation, you should just be able to do without any trouble.
I'm clicking on that because what I'm going to do is click the garbage can.
I'm actually going to remove my existing
Google Authenticator compatible two-factor authentication.
Am I sure?
Yes, I'm sure.
Now, at this point, I do not have Google Authenticator
compatible two-factor authentication enabled for this account.
If If I'm using authy, this would be the time to remove the entry
for this account from authy or from whatever Google compatible two-factor
authenticator application you happen to be using.
Now, however, I'm going to add a two-factor authentication application.
We'll go ahead and set up the authenticator, and there's a QR code.
Now what?
Well, we're going to go over here to the one password entry for this account.
This is the Ask Leo test Google account in my one password vault.
I'm going to edit it, and I'm going to add more.
One of the things we can add more is a one-time password.
Now, at this point, nothing's happening, right?
However, how would you take a picture of this QR
code if application you want to do this with is also running on the same computer?
Well, that's what this little icon over here is for.
Scan the QR code from the clipboard or the screen.
I'm going to go ahead and click it.
Now, Now it has a one-time password set up.
We have set up
a one password with a Google authenticator, two-factor authentication.
If we now hit Save, what we'll see now is
that Sure enough, there's the two-factor number that changes every 30 seconds.
I'm going to click Next over here
in Google because, of course, then it wants to confirm that we have
things set up properly, and we do that by entering the current
code as displayed by the two-factor authentication device.
What that means here is I just click on it because it gets copied to the clipboard.
I could then go over here, paste, and click Verify.
Boom.
We Now, we have two-factor authentication turned back on in Google,
but this time we are now using the one-time password field in 1Password.
Now, what's actually interesting about this, I'm going to go ahead and close
this, close down this other one, and I'm going to go ahead and sign out.
Now, after clearing cookies, that basically causes the website
to Insist on using two-factor authentication the next time I sign in.
I'm going to sign in, I'm going to sign in.
We're going to sign in as askleotest with the password.
Now, notice, not only have we been asked for the two-factor authentication code,
one password filled it in for us, and we're in.
We didn't even have to copy paste.
We didn't have to type in the six-digit number.
It just worked.
Now, I will say that it doesn't always
automatically paste the two-factor code in for you, but a lot of times it does.
If it doesn't, well,
copy paste is your friend because you can go over here to the entry in 1Password
for that account and click on the currently displayed
one-time passcode, and it's in the clipboard.
You could see, I'm just going to paste it here into this search field.
You could see I just copied it over. If you take a look,
You'll notice that the password is in fact changing every 30 seconds.
At some point, there it goes.
Now it's 21207. 3.
You get the idea, though.
This is acting as your second factor, your Google authenticator compatible
second factor, all bundled up in one password.
Where is one password?
Everywhere I want it to be.
It's on my desktop, it's on my laptop,
it's on my Mac, it's on my Linux machine, it's available on my on my iPad.
You get the idea.
Everything, once again, is synchronized exactly
the way we want it to be as if it were offee, exactly like offee used to.
Now It's one less program to have around.
Once you've transferred all of your
two-factor codes to 1Password, well, you no longer need authy.
Now, I will caveat that with exactly one
thing, and that is I have two-factor enabled on my 1Password account.
What that means is there needs to be a Google authenticator
that is not 1Password in order to open 1Password.
It's a chicken and egg situation.
I will probably end up keeping authy on my mobile device
simply for those times when I need a two-factor code for one password.
All of the With all of their two-factor
codes that I use that are Google authenticator compatible,
I am now in the process of going through what we just showed you, turning off
two-factor authentication on the account, turning it back on again,
and setting it up this time with 1Password as the two-factor code device.
Hope that helps. I hope that this gives you some idea
of what you can do if you rely on authy desktop.
If you rely on authy mobile only, by all means, carry on.
Or if you're using a different authenticator, like Google Authenticator
or some of the others, and you're happy with it,
and this change to authy doesn't impact you, fine, no problem.
But I thought I'd let you know that this
for 1Password users is actually a very interesting alternative.
For updates, for comments,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
askleo.com/168085.
I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is
askleo.com. Thanks for watching.