How to secure your PHP application with 2FA

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash

Security has become a significant challenge for web applications. Passwords are no longer enough to secure user accounts. Therefore an additional layer of protection is essential to make the user account more secure.

Using 2FA (two-factor authentication) doesn’t guarantee a hack-free web application. However, it helps put an extra layer of protection on the user account.

In this article, I will be showing you the steps required to set up 2FA on your PHP application.

System Requirement

• The QR code generator makes use of the image GD library which is needed for the QR code image to be generated.
• You will need to install an authenticator app on my mobile phone. For example; Authy, Google Authenticator, etc.

Install the package

You need to install the packages via a composer

composer require pragmarx/google2fa

composer require bacon/bacon-qr-code

Adjust User Table

You will need a column to be added to your authentication table in other to keep the secret key generated from the library. And this will be used to verify the code generated from the Authenticator app later.

For this tutorial, I will…