Ever find yourself juggling endless passwords, worried about whether they’re secure enough? You’re not alone. In today’s digital landscape, protecting sensitive accounts and data goes beyond just a clever passphrase. Enter multi-factor authentication (MFA)—an effective layer of defense that ensures a random intruder can’t waltz in with stolen credentials.
Time-Based One-Time Password (TOTP) systems are a powerful way to implement MFA, producing short-lived codes that are invalid mere seconds later. If you’ve ever used an authenticator app on your phone, you’ve already seen TOTP at work. However, building your own TOTP generator can offer greater flexibility for custom workflows, automation, and even just tinkering to learn something new.
In this tutorial, we’ll walk through a PowerShell script that securely stores your TOTP secret keys in the Windows Registry, then generates fresh codes whenever you need them. By the end, you’ll have a handy, easily integrable tool that keeps your secrets encrypted and your one-time passwords safe and ready on demand. Let’s jump in!
Historically, updating software on Windows has been a pain. You had to go to each website, download the installer, and run it. This was especially true for software that was not installed from the Microsoft Store. While this is still true for some software, there is a new tool that makes updating software much easier.
When configuring a development environment, you can use the PowerShell command to display all environment variables. This can be useful for gathering information about the environment, or for debugging.
You're trying to spin up your development server, and boom: "Port 3000 is already in use." Sound familiar? This scenario plays out daily in development environments worldwide. Sometimes it's obvious (your React app is still running from yesterday), but often it's a mystery process lurking in the background.
Instead of rebooting your machine or randomly killing processes, let's solve this systematically using the right tools for the job.