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Forum Discussion
Feature Request: Simpler way to save 2FA/MFA backup codes
One of the areas of tedium I often encounter is managing the backup codes that are generated when I setup 2FA/MFA on a new account. They always tell you to print, but c'mon — it's 2022. I haven't own...
Hihi Ben,
With regards to "why keeping those at all", there would be multiple reasons:
- Clock drift from the server or client that would lead to the generation of misaligned tokens
- User erratic manipulation leading to the removal/corruption of the totp seed in 1password that is currently unrecoverable
- 1password bug leading to corrupted tokens being generated
With TOTP being a dynamic value rather than a static one, there are numerous things that could possibly go wrong.
Some providers rely on 2fa to absolutely identify a user and some even more restrictive (or poorly design depending on the point of view) do not have a recovery path beyond the recovery codes.
You are correct as well, recommending to print and store those recovery codes somewhere else is advisable (and for some of them I do myself do that), but for ease of access I also believe that being able to store them easily in 1password is a valid use case.
