I recently came across the Mobile One-Time-Passwords project, which aims to make a free, secure alternative
to commercial two-factor authentication systems (like SecurID). The thinking is pretty simple:
virtually everybody now carries a mobile phone capable of running basic applications, so there’s no reason that such an application couldn’t provide the processing power to generate
one-time-passwords based on a shared secret, a PIN number known only to the authenticating party and to the server, and the current date and time stamp.
Great! But it turns out that despite there being libraries to produce server-side implementations of the technology in PHP, Perl, and C, nobody had yet bothered to write one in that
most marvelous of programming languages, Ruby.
Well, now I have. So if anybody’s got the urge to add one-time-password based security to their Rails or Sinatra app, or would like to write an MOTP client for their Ruby-capable smartphone: well, now you can.