Google Authenticator for Rust (GARS)

If you use Google Authenticator for multi-factor authentication (MFA) and would like to automate authentication, then GARS is for you.

Install from source

cargo install --path .

Usage

Create an environment variable with your Google Authenticator secret:

export GA_SECRET=YOUR_GA_SECRET_HERE

Run gars from the command line.

$ gars
123456

gars will return the latest Google Authenticator generated number associated with the given GA secret to stdout.

Tested on Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X.

Why was GARS created

MFA is great for added security but makes it difficult to automate things.

What is Google Authenticator

Google Authenticator is a software-based authenticator by Google that implements two-step verification services using the Time-based One-time Password Algorithm and HMAC-based One-time Password algorithm, for authenticating users of software applications.

It's also one of several mechanisms that Okta uses for MFA.

Credit

This is just a simple wrapper around the google-authenticator library.