The GA4PHP Project ================== GA4PHP means Google Authenticator for PHP. The purpose of this "library" is to provde a convienient and hopefully simple way of provisioning and authenticating users using the Google Authenticator mechanism Why? ==== Mostly cause I can. Recently i've been heavily interesting in what is "out there" for FOSS based authentication projects and the Google Authenticator is based on OATH - HOTP/TOTP. It also has a few kewl features, like providing its secret key via QR codes. But looking at the App's available for smartphones (android, iphone, etc), the google auth app was the only one that fullfilled some realistic criteria - easy to use, easy to provision. How? ==== Ultimately, this is just a library with a web based example, the purpose of which is to integrate into your exisint applications, those that are PHP. Complications ============= The only real complication i've had so far is that alot of the HOTP based keys out there provide the secret key as HEX where google choose to use base32, of which there exist no single or simple implementation. So I wrote my (rather terrible so far) own as all i really want to do is convert from base32 back to hex, this I do by converting to binary first... Lets how thats going to work in the long run. The sad thing is is that if I were writing it in C/C++/etc, bit math is easy and while im sure its not too different in PHP, I've never done it, so this seeemed easier.