Today, my Twitch login process was one of the most ridiculous web interactions ever! As usual, Twitch sees every new browser session (cookies cleaned, no memory of the previous visited sites) as a “new device” and forces the user to provide a 6-digit code, to complement the user-password challenge. Unfortunately, those 6-digits came via email, and sloooowly, with a latency of minutes between the code request and the arrival of the corresponding email message. Maybe due to this latency, every time I entered the correct code, Twitch reacted as if I was writing the wrong number. Very frustrating.
At some stage, I finally succeeded and took the opportunity to change my Twitch security settings:
https://www.twitch.tv/settings/security
I decided to enable two-factor authentication (2FA), which means a second authentication challenge, after the user-password. First, I provided a phone-number, which indeed got associated with the account, but future logins will require not a SMS sent to the phone number, but a code generated by the “Authy” app, Twillio’s (twillio.com) equivalent to “Google Authenticator”.
When I first started using 2FA, SMS seemed the best option: I controlled the number, it required no extra app, so it was simpler, and that was – and is – something of great importance!
Unfortunately, as many are bound to find, sooner rather than later, SMS is now considerably insecure and more prone to failure than using time-sensitive security apps. The top reason SMS has failed me in the past, was phone-network operator restrictions, temporary phone-network traffic issues, and/or other reasons strictly under the phone-network operator control: there were situations when I needed a SMS in 30 seconds, and it would never arrive that promptly. That was the day when I quit SMS for app-based 2FA. The data comes from an operator agnostic network – the Internet.
Nowadays, SMS should be a second choice, relatively to Authy and equivalents, not only because of not depending on one specific phone-operator network, but also because the system is more vulnerable, with increasingly more documented SIM-card hijacking events.
Technical Details
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