roooodcastro/rails_mfa_test

MFA Test

This is a proof-of-concept application designed to test a 2FA (two factor authentication) system in Rails using the bare minimum, in a "roll your own" style.

It uses three specific gems, one to create and verify OTP tokens, another to convert the token to base32, and the last one to join it all together, generating a QR Code so the user can read the token in his mobile phone.

Main Requirements:

• Ruby 2.5
• Rails 5.2
• base32 gem
• rotp gem
• rqrcode gem
• bootstrap (for styling only)

How to get started:

1. Download or clone this repository
2. Install Ruby and run bundler
3. Create database with rails db:setup
4. If needed, run rails db:seed
5. Run the rails server and log in as admin using the password admin
6. Go to /users/1 (the show view) and activate 2FA
7. Read the QR Code using Google Authenticator or other similar app
8. Copy the given nonce tokens in case you lose access to your phone.

Features:

There is a User model, which only has basic name/password columns, along with the mfa_secret column that stores the 2FA token, if present. If this column is null, it means the user is not using 2FA, so it won't prompt for this on login.

Once the user decides to activate the 2FA functionality, a random 32-byte hex string is generated and stored in the mfa_secret column. 10 nonce tokens are also created at this time, erasing all tokens that might previously exist for that user. Each nonce token is also a 32-byte random hex string.

The base32 gem is used to convert this mfa_secret to base32, which is generally required for the TOTP protocol. The rotp gem is used to generate the TOTP URI, which is then used by the rqrcode gem to create an SVG image of the QR Code representing this URI.

When the user logs in, he will need to provide his name and password, and if those are correct, it will prompt for his 2FA token, which is a time based token. If the user loses access to this token, he can use one of the 10 nonce tokens. Once one of these tokens is used, it cannot be reused, so if the user loses his 2FA access and uses up all of his nonces, he cannot access his account anymore. Obviously a "production-ready" app will have ways to prevent this.

The rotp gem is not only used to generate the TOTP URI, but is also used to verify the token when the user is logging in. Although this app does not make use of this feature, rotp also allows for time drift (when the system clock of the server is different from the system clock of the mobile phone).

If the user doesn't want to use 2FA anymore, he can disable it from his user's show page. The mfa_secret token will be erased, along with all of his nonce tokens.