indie two-factor auth

I was noting to Tantek Çelik this week while we were at #pdf2012 that as I’ve been moving to Google alternatives to various services (namely Dropbox to Google Drive), I’m reminded that my Google account is one of the most secure accounts I have anywhere. It ranks up there with my bank, Paypal, Facebook, and (somewhat ironically) World of Warcraft, as one of the few accounts that have multi-factor authentication.

But what’s the #indieweb version of multi-factor authentication? I want to power my own OpenID, but I want it to be as secure as possible. Is it at all practical to try and have a more “independent” multi-factor auth? Or is it just best left to the large companies that have the security resources to invest in this? Tantek had the additional idea of an indieweb solution where each deployment was slightly different in some way, making mass attacks far less practical since it would be unique per site.

I don’t know enough of the specifics of this problem space… mainly just thinking out loud. Anyone ever tried to setup a more secure auth mechanism on your own?

(Of course, the huge caveat also being that all of this is only as secure as the hardware you’re running it on. I’m sure a standard off-the-shelf VPS pales in comparison to the security of Google’s production infrastructure)

Have you written a response to this? Let me know the URL: