My Discord app was acting up, and not sending messages or reading touchscreen input. I poked around my phone to see if I could find a cause and eventually stumbled across my Android version info. I hadn’t realized it but my phone had not received an update in nearly 3 years! This may be unrelated to my Discord problems, but it’s a larger concern for obvious reasons.
After a couple searches I found out OnePlus dropped support for my phone and no new updates were coming my way. I don’t want to shell out several hundred dollars to purchase a new phone to replace one that, at least on a hardware level, is still perfectly functional. So, after some research, I decided to flash my phone to LineageOS. It all went well, and my issues with Discord were even fixed. Noice. I restored most of my apps without issues except one, Authy.
When trying to log into the Authy app to restore my codes I get “The device does not meet the minimum integrity requirements”. Wtf? Because I am using a custom OS? It’s not even rooted! I have a few other authentication apps, Steam, Microsoft, etc and none of them complained or otherwise had problems restoring. Sadly, Authy had most of my codes, so I need them back somehow.
I managed to install Authy on my drawing tablet of all things, and now at least I could get back into my accounts, but I really need it on my phone. I’m not exactly lugging a drawing tablet around on a daily basis. I searched, but there is no export option. Not only is there no export option, that is by design!
I get the security implications of preventing exports, but at the same time… it’s my data, I should be able to back it up and restore it myself. It should be my decision to trust a phone with a custom OS over a phone with 3 years of known vulnerabilities and no future updates.
Failing to find an option to export the codes, I used an irritating combination of my phone, drawing tablet and PC over the course of 2 hours to swap the 2FA settings on all of my associated accounts to another 2FA application. Due to this, I’d recommend anyone on Authy to swap to another app before they end up in a similar situation.
Aegis gives you full control (and responsibility!) of your 2FA codes, whereas Microsoft Authenticator also locks you out of manually backing up your codes but at least in this case did not arbitrarily prevent me from restoring on LineageOS.