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Two-Factor Authentication with Authy, PHP and Laravel

As of November 2022, Twilio no longer provides support for Authy SMS/Voice-only customers. Customers who were also using Authy TOTP or Push prior to March 1, 2023 are still supported. The Authy API is now closed to new customers and will be fully deprecated in the future.

For new development, we encourage you to use the Verify v2 API.

Existing customers will not be impacted at this time until Authy API has reached End of Life. For more information about migration, see Migrating from Authy to Verify for SMS.

Adding Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) to your web application increases the security of your user's data by requiring something your user has to be present for step-up transactions, log-ins, and other sensitive actions. Multi-factor authentication determines the identity of a user by validating once by logging into the app, and then by validating their mobile device.

This PHP Laravel sample application is an example of a typical login flow using Two-Factor Authentication. To run this sample app yourself, download the code and follow the instructions on GitHub.

For the second factor, we will validate that the user has their mobile phone by either:

  • Sending them a OneTouch push notification to their mobile Authy Client app or
  • Sending them a token through their mobile Authy app or
  • Sending them a one-time token in a text message.

See how VMware uses Twilio Two-Factor Authentication to secure their enterprise mobility management solution.

Click here to start the tutorial!

Configuring Authy

If you haven't configured Authy already, now is the time to sign up for Authy. Create your first application naming it as you wish. After you create your application, your "production" API key will be visible on your dashboard

Once we have an Authy API key we can register it as an environment variable.

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        .env.example

        Configure Authy environment variables

        .env.example

        Let's take a look at how we register a user with Authy.

        Register a user using Authy

        Register a User with Authy

        When a new user signs up for our website, we will call this route. This will save our new user to the database and will register the user with Authy.

        In order to set up your application, Authy only needs the user's email, phone number and country code. In order to do a two-factor authentication, we need to make sure we ask for this information at sign up.

        Once we register the User with Authy we get an authy id back. This is very important since it's how we will verify the identity of our User with Authy.

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              app/User.php

              Register a User with Authy

              app/User.php
              See how to log a user in with OneTouch

              Log in with Authy OneTouch

              When a User attempts to log in to our website, we will ask them for a second form of identification. Let's take a look at Authy's OneTouch verification first.

              OneTouch works like this:

              • We attempt to send a User a OneTouch Approval Request.
              • If the User has OneTouch enabled we will get a success message back.
              • The User hits Approve in their Authy app.
              • Authy makes a POST request to our app with an approved status.
              • We log the User in.
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                    app/Http/Controllers/Auth/AuthController.php

                    Log in with Authy OneTouch

                    app/Http/Controllers/Auth/AuthController.php
                    Send the OneTouch request

                    Send the OneTouch Request

                    When our User logs in we immediately attempt to verify their identity with OneTouch. We will fallback gracefully if they don't have a OneTouch device, but we won't know until we try.

                    Authy allows us to input details with our OneTouch request, including a message, a logo and so on. We could easily send any amount of details by appending details['some_detail']. You could imagine a scenario where we send a OneTouch request to approve a money transfer.

                    $params = array(
                      'message' => "Request to send money to Jarod's vault",
                      'details[From]' => "Jarod",
                      'details[Amount]' => "1,000,000",
                      'details[Currency]' => "Galleons",
                    )
                    

                    Once we send the request we need to update our User's authy_status based on the response.

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                          app/User.php

                          Send the OneTouch Request

                          app/User.php
                          Configure OneTouch callback

                          Configure the OneTouch callback

                          In order for our app to know what the user did after we sent the OneTouch request, we need to register a callback endpoint with Authy.

                          Here in our callback, we look up the user using the authy_id sent with the Authy POST request. Ideally at this point we would probably use a websocket to let our client know that we received a response from Authy. However, for this version we're going to keep it simple and just update the authy_status on the User.

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                                app/Http/Controllers/Auth/AuthyController.php

                                Update user status using Authy Callback

                                app/Http/Controllers/Auth/AuthyController.php

                                Let's take a look at the client-side code that will be handling this.

                                How Unsuccessful OneTouch Callbacks are disabled

                                Disabling Unsuccessful Callbacks

                                Scenario: The OneTouch callback URL provided by you is no longer active.

                                Action: We will disable the OneTouch callback after 3 consecutive HTTP error responses. We will also

                                • Set the OneTouch callback URL to blank.
                                • Send an email notifying you that the OneTouch callback is disabled with details on how to enable the OneTouch callback.

                                How to enable OneTouch callback? You need to update the OneTouch callback endpoint, which will allow the OneTouch callback.

                                Visit the Twilio Console: Console > Authy > Applications > {ApplicationName} > Push Authentication > Webhooks > Endpoint/URL to update the Endpoint/URL with a valid OneTouch callback URL.

                                Handle authentication in the browser

                                Handle Two-Factor in the Browser

                                We've already taken a look at what's happening on the server side, so let's step in front of the cameras and see how our JavaScript is interacting with those server endpoints.

                                When we expect a OneTouch response, we will begin by polling /authy/status until we see an Authy status is not empty. Let's take a look at this controller and see what is happening.

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                                      public/js/sessions.js

                                      Handle Two-Factor in the Browser

                                      public/js/sessions.js
                                      Accept or deny Authy status

                                      Finishing the 2FA Step

                                      If authy_status is approved the user will be redirected to the protected content, otherwise we'll show the login form with a message that indicates the request was denied.

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                                            app/Http/Controllers/Auth/AuthyController.php

                                            Redirect user to the correct page based based on authentication status

                                            app/Http/Controllers/Auth/AuthyController.php

                                            That's it! We've just implemented two-factor authentication using three different methods and the latest in Authy technology.

                                            What's next?

                                            Where to next?

                                            If you're a PHP developer working with Twilio, you might want to check out these other tutorials.

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                                            Did this help?

                                            Thanks for checking out this tutorial! If you have any feedback to share with us, we'd love to hear it. Connect with us on Twitter and let us know what you build!

                                            Jarod Reyes Kelley Robinson Kat King Andrew Baker Paul Kamp Alejandro Vivanco Anna Mason Chandan Manjunath
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                                            Need some help?

                                            We all do sometimes; code is hard. Get help now from our support team, or lean on the wisdom of the crowd by visiting Twilio's Stack Overflow Collective or browsing the Twilio tag on Stack Overflow.

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