The emulated Authenticator Edition

updated Feb18 '11

Everybody knows them, everybody hates them

HACKER, CRACKER, ACCOUNT THIEVES, SCAMMER... call them names.

There is an easy way to prevent stuff like that happens. Get an official Authenticator Keyfob, Install the Cellphone App on your dumbphone, get the official app for your Apple or Android Device... or just emulate a phone on your PC.

In this blog post I would like to describe how to setup said emulator.

DISCLAIMER This is a Software Authenticator and can probably be abused by a sophisticated trojan. Though i doubt this will happen I cant be liable if this happens.

For those that can't get their hands onto a physical Authenticator yet, with the release of the Android App it's now really easy to create an emulated Authenticator which behaves like the app on your phone.


Setting it up should be rather easy and quickly done.

You need a google account! aswell as ~180mb at a choosen place for the SDK and ~270MB in your c:/users/<name> folder.

1. You will need the Java SE Development Kit, get it at https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP...-CDS_Developer

2. Go to http://dl.google.com/android/installer_r09-windows.exe and grab the latest SDK EXE Installer

3. Install and on the first start allow the SDK to update it's files.
This will take a moment to download.

4. click on Virtual Devices -> New... -> Name: AndroidAuthenticator -> Target: Android 1.6 -> SD Card: 128 MiB -> Skin: Built-in Default -> Hardware: Dont change anything.

Create AVD -> click ok

Select the new virtual Device and select Details...
write down or memorize the Path, you will need it later

5. Go to HTC - Developer Center and download the Android 1.6 System Image. Open the archive and extract the content to the path you noted down. there should be a config.ini, sdcard.img and userdata.img already in there. Just replace the content of the folder with the content of the archive you downloaded.

6. Select your AndroidAuthenticator AVD and click Start... -> check "wipe user data" and click on Launch

This will take a moment and the Emulator will reset the emulated device and boot it up for the first time.

7. click on the green android -> skip -> skip -> next

8. Now you see the Home Screen of your virtual android phone. -> click on market -> next -> sign in -> Enter your google account name and password, then click Done (you can just type on your keyboard) -> click sign in -> accept the ToS

9. Android Market will load now -> click the magnifying glass to search -> type "battle.net" and hit return -> you will be presented with the Battle.net Authenticator FREE application -> click it and select Install then OK to let it use the Network Connection

The Download will start and install the Application. Wait a moment until in the top left the download arrow changed to a checked file icon. In the search results INSTALLED can be found on the right side of the Battle.net Authenticator.

10. click on the Home button of the Emulator to the right which will take you to the home screen of your AVD and click on the grey tab in the bottom center. Click and Hold the Battle.net Icon to drag it to the home screen, then click the icon to start it.

11. The Authenticator App will inform you that you are running in a "rooted" state. Click OK.
Write down the Serial Number
Click on View Code. The authenticator works now.


12. We need to do some clean-up stuff now. Close the Emulator window by clicking on the X on the top right corner. Select your AVD and click on Start... again. UNCHECK Wipe user data and click start. Let it load, Click the Menu button, start the Authenticator, click ok, Click Menu -> setup Compare the serial, if its the same all is working as supposed. If not, start over at 8. click on the return arrow and close the Emulator Window and the SDK window.

13. Create a shortcut pointing to "<folder you placed the sdk>\tools\emulator.exe -avd AndroidAuthenticator" for easy starting.

14. Congratulation, you now have a working Software Authenticator.

Tip: In day by day use, you want to hit the menu button and click on setup, to reduce the amount of cpu power the emulator draws. It takes me from 15% to 0-1% cpu load if I do that instead of letting it sit in the "blue bar screen".

Addon: Chris Heald from the Addon community of wowace wrote an alternate interface to the authentication interface which allows to use multiple authenticators on an Android phone so you can assign different tokens to different accounts if you run more than one account. You can find it by searching for FlexAuth on the Android Store.



Adding a new Authenticator is as easy as selecting "Add a Token", entering a handle to identify it and click "Request New Token". You want to write down the serial and secret so you can restore a token if needed. Click "Save" once you have done that.



Restoring is as easy as selecting "Add Token", Tap enter manually and fill in the backuped name, serial and secret and you are good to go again.

changelog:
February 18th, 2011 - Updated to reflect the changes to the JDK and general Download/Installation process, added Info about FlexAuth