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Show HN: Auto-OTP: automatically send and receive OTPs, end-to-end encrypted

auto-otp.com

20 points by apugoneappu 4 years ago · 16 comments

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apugoneappuOP 4 years ago

Hi HN. My name is Apoorve, I am 23 year old undergraduate student.

I share a lot of internet accounts (Netflix, prime etc.) with my friends and family, and recently have been in OTP (one-time-password) hell. I built Auto-OTP to securely send and receive OTPs from people I trust.

This is mostly meant as a beta release so please do check it out and share your feedback :)

saimiam 4 years ago

I built something similar with Shortcuts or whatever the iOS automation thing is called.

1. Receive otp 2. Launch automation which posts entire message content to url 3. Broadcast message to other people in my circle.

It works fine so long as my OTPs arrive correctly.

  • apugoneappuOP 4 years ago

    Hey, that’s pretty cool!

    I have a question about your method - Are all messages broadcasted to the server? If only the ones with an OTP, are OTP messages for all apps broadcasted to those people?

    In Auto-OTP, the OTP can be forwarded to different people app-wise. For example, you may choose who should receive the OTP for app1, who receives for app2 etc.

    • saimiam 4 years ago

      I have a rule which searches for the keyword OTP in incoming SMSes so not all messages get forwarded.

      With this Shortcut her information is posted to a url, iOS requires the user to click okay to execute the action. So, you still have control on whether a message gets broadcast or not.

      E.g., if a friend messages me asking “hey, did you get the OTP?”, my shortcut will prompt me to broadcast the SMS via the url but I can choose not to.

advisedwang 4 years ago

Can someone explain what the use case for this is?

I clearly am not the target audience as I've never forwarded an OTP... but I'm curious what other people are doing that makes this needed.

  • apugoneappuOP 4 years ago

    Hey!

    The primary use case is for multiple people wanting to access an account that is behind 2FA.

    Example of such folks are - 1) My dad wanting to access my bank account details without having to trouble me 2) Me wanting to login to my brother’s OTT accounts (hotstar, prime etc.) 3) CAs needing bank access for small business owners

JadoJodo 4 years ago

Feedback: The "Lifetime" pricing shows "$90/mo". I suspect this is supposed to be "$90", but I'm not certain.

kevincox 4 years ago

You should probably define "OTP" somewhere on the page. Maybe just spell it out "One Time Password (OTP)" the first time you use it.

nocsi 4 years ago

So this automatically degrades 2-factor to… 1 factor again. The security model doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in me, being that you expect user-interaction as a means of security. It’s already bad enough people are tying their OTP with their credentials in password managers…

  • apugoneappuOP 4 years ago

    It’s still 2 factor, just that a few permitted people have access to the one time password. It’s identical to manually sharing the OTP, just automated.

    > The security model doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in me, being that you expect user-interaction as a means of security.

    Could you please elaborate on what this means?

    • jafjaf 4 years ago

      they are describing a trend where security is omitted or skipped because it’s inconvenient. even though OTP is used to increase security, it’s inconvenient for people so they go around it like this.

iamshnik 4 years ago

Seems like a very useful product. Will give it a try

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