What If I Lose My 2FA

Be prepared for the day you lose your phone

Last weekend I released a little side-project called What If I Lose My 2FA. The impetus was the famous “Boot Loop of Death” that happened to my Nexus 5X a couple of weeks ago. I got the phone fixed in the end but only after having to reinstall a fresh version of Android.

That was not a huge issue except that I had secured many services with 2FA using the Google Authenticator software token app. I was locked out of all those services now. For some I had saved recovery codes which allowed me to get back in, but unfortunately not for all.

And I can tell you that it was quite a hassle to regain access to those accounts. Most notably, getting back into Sutori’s AWS account required a visit to the notary to sign and seal an affidavit.

Needless to say, this was an adventure I didn’t want to put myself through a second time. I vowed myself to be better prepared in case I lose access to my phone again. A phone can get broken, lost or stolen so this will inevitably happen.

One of the difficulties in being prepared is that each service handles the loss of a 2FA device differently. For instance, you can get back into AWS with a matching email address and phone number. On the other hand, Google hands out single-use backup codes that you can use instead of a 2FA-generated code.

This is the reason that I created What If I Lose My 2FA. It gives exactly the information that you need to keep in order to recover your account for a variety of services.

I hope it’s of use to you! And don’t hesitate to fill out the form to propose a service if there’s one you’d like to see up there.

Some technical specs

• The website is a single-page application built with Ember.js. It’s most certainly overkill for this project but it’s what I know best. Therefore I was able to build and deploy it in a couple of hours.
• It stores your choice of services in your browser’s local storage. I didn’t want to deal with a backend.
• It works offline thanks to service workers! This deserves a shoutout to the maintainers of the ember-service-worker addon.
• Deployed and hosted by Netlify. The Heroku-esque way of automatically deploying after a git push origin master is so easy. Setting up HTTPS is also a breeze. And it’s free for static websites!