Adding second factor authentication with FIDO U2F
This is the first semester since the Fall of 2015 that I have not taught a course with the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences. It was a pleasure teaching and I was lucky enough to spend most of my time on a course I had designed. For the Spring 2016 semester I designed the syllabus and began teaching a course on machine learning and object oriented python. I chose to include a web application as I felt it exposed the students to some unfamiliar ideas.
Most of the students were fellow scientists. Many only had previous experience writing scripts for use in their own research. Not trusting user input was often a novel concept. During the course I only had a couple of hours to introduce web applications. This meant I skipped over many important topics. I intend this post to be the first in a collection moving beyond the basics for anyone still new to these concepts. I will start with a basic background but the actual implementation will hopefully be new for most. If implementing web application authentication is familiar to you then skip ahead to the implementation.
Let me know if there are topics you think I should cover moving forward.
In this post I will cover authentication, specifically adding a second authentication factor for additional security.