In our on going effort to increase the security of our Linux account, beginning Fall 2015 the CS Department is adding Google Authenticator as an optional service for users who wants to increase the security of his/her Linux account on a CS Linux machine. In general, for better security, you should enable Two-factor authentication wherever the service is provided. To learn more check Pixel Privacy Two-Factor Authentication explanation.
Note: This software is currently only running on all Centos 7 Graduate machines as a test. If there is a lot of interest, it may be deployed on all CS Linux Systems in the future. Please let us know what you think.
If you do not have a smart phone or tablets, you can also run Google Authenticator as part of a GAuth addon for your computer browser, GAuth Webpage or a portable windows App like JAuth, WinAuth etc.
% google-authenticator Do you want authentication tokens to be time-based (y/n) y https://www.google...@YOURHOSTNAME%3Fsecret%3DWYD4SYCGEE5N4M3LA Your new secret key is: WYD4SYCGEE5N4M3LA Your verification code is 163127 Your emergency scratch codes are: 40186300 18418071 87502143 30873576 00892542 Do you want me to update your "/path/homedir/.google_authenticator" file (y/n) y Do you want to disallow multiple uses of the same authentication token? This restricts you to one login about every 30s, but it increases your chances to notice or even prevent man-in-the-middle attacks (y/n) y By default, tokens are good for 30 seconds and in order to compensate for possible time-skew between the client and the server, we allow an extra token before and after the current time. If you experience problems with poor time synchronization, you can increase the window from its default size of 1:30min to about 4min. Do you want to do so (y/n) y If the computer that you are logging into isn't hardened against brute-force login attempts, you can enable rate-limiting for the authentication module. By default, this limits attackers to no more than 3 login attempts every 30s. Do you want to enable rate-limiting (y/n) y
Note: On an SSH session, the verification code is asked before your password, otherwise, verification code will be asked after your password is entered.
Please direct Questions and Problems to help@cs.rutgers.edu