This is something I am seeing more and more of. As companies start to either offer or require 2FA for accounts, they don’t follow the common standards or even offer any sort of options. One thing that drives me nuts is when they don’t offer TOTP as an option. It seems like many companies either use text messages to send a code or use some built in method of authorizing a sign in from a mobile device app.
What are your thoughts on why they want to take the time to maintain this extra feature in an app when you could have just implemented a TOTP method that probably can be imported as an existing library with much less effort?
Are they assuming that people are too dumb to understand TOTP? Are they wanting phone numbers from people? Is it to force people to install their apps?
*edit: I also really want to know what not at least give people the option to choose something like TOTP. They can still offer mobile app verification, SMS, email, carrier pigeon, etc for other options but at least give the user a choice of something besides an insecure method like SMS.
Do you know how hard it is to implement TOTP? It took me two hours to implement it in my email service. You can’t expect these multimillion dollar corporations to pay an engineer for two whole hours of work to implement a tested and proven standard.
I even found the commit.
https://github.com/sciactive/nymphjs/commit/cc9f8edb183271fa7f51e4b182b876efb8fa0f8d
Literally half the code was just the UI to set it up. And half of that was just links to various authenticator apps.