What are some iPhone or Android applications that use SMS as their primary means of user authentication?
I'm interested to see such apps in action. SMS-auth seems like a natural approach that is well-situated to mobile contexts.
The basic workflow is: to sign up, a user provides a phone number; the app calls a backend webservice which generates a signed URL and sends it to the phone number via an SMS gateway; the user receives the SMS, clicks the link, and is thus verified and logged in. This results in a very strong user identity that is difficult to spoof yet fairly easy. It can be paired with a username or additional account attributes as needed for the product requirements.
Despite the advantages, this does not seem to be in much use - hence my question. My initial assumption is that this is because products and users are wary of asking for / providing phone numbers, which users consider sensitive information. That said, I hope this becomes an increasingly more commonplace approach.
This is mostly used for employee authentication ... there is a strong value in replacing the older physical tokens with a new SMS based two-factor authentication to ensure that the users accessing your corporate systems have not had their credentials stolen. We're a technology leader in this space and is the partner that worked with Citrix Systems to develop SMS Authentication for their iPhone Receiver. The benefit is that you gain strong two-factor authentication in an easy to use fashion specifically for the iPhone that do not support multiple applications at the same time. For other systems such as the VPN client from Cisco and most other Windows and Android phones, you can run multiple apps and therefore establish a secure connection using standard vpn and ssl vpn technologies.
The Citrix Receiver for iPhone was one of the most downloaded business apps on the store, I've been told.
If you want to learn more about it check out both the Cisco VPN and the Citrix Receiver implementations for SMS Authentication at http://blog.smspasscode.com/
I hope this information is helpful to you.
Rgds
Lars
SMS PASSCODE
WhatsApp does. The app sends a SMS to the phone number you entered, and if you receive the message, they create your account and you can use the app.
It's not very common to have SMS gateway available! Also using it (sending SMS messages) costs quite a lot compared to sending emails.
Much easier to just generate and send verification email.
Loopt for iPhone is a good example. As part of initial sign up you provide your phone number and are sent a confirmation SMS to complete the process. It's simple and painless.
Related
I have seen a couple different apps (Snapchat, whatsapp, etc.) ask users to input their phone number. A text message is then sent to the user with a code to verify that the number is actually their number. Then they are able to see which of the users address book contacts also have the app.
I understand how all of this works except how they are sending the text messages to the user. Are they running their own SMS Gateway like Kannel, using an SMS gateway provider like twilio, or am I completely missing another option?
Seems like using a gateway provider even at 1 cent a message would add up very quickly especially when you are really only trying to protect the app from the few users that purposely put in the wrong phone number.
Most of the apps use sms gateway services, yes sms is costly, there is another way to verify the user number by missed call trick.
http://dial2verify.com/
Ok I know there are many possible duplicate questions but none answers my question.
According to Apple's App Store Review Guidelines (if it is the official one) I can only find 4 rules stating anything about messaging
5.5 Apps that use Push Notifications to send unsolicited messages, or for the purpose of phishing or spamming will be rejected
6.5 Apps that use Game Center service to send unsolicited messages, or for the purpose of phishing or spamming will be rejected
21.2 The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS
22.6 Apps that enable anonymous or prank phone calls or SMS/MMS messaging will be rejected
According to me these rules does not restrict auto sending a message completely, if we have user's concern of sending the SMS.
Now I want to know is there's anyway that I can auto send SMS on a scheduled time when the app is suspended, like we can fire UILocalNotification?
If Yes then how and if No then why?
I also don't want to use any third party API or some server side programming. I want to send a simple SMS from phone.
No you can not send an e-mail or SMS via the Apple provided SDK without the user sending the messages.
You could setup your own mail server of SMS server to provide a solution to this, but you will not be able to do it with the Apple provided SDK.
The reason why this is implement this way is to protect the user, since you could just send 100 SMS to some kind of server number and thus make the user unaware of the costs.
Or you app could start spamming user with email by sending email without the users consent.
I am looking at building an ordering service, this is fine but my question is how to reliably get the order to the shop. It is a fast food shop.
Are there any solid delivery options either via sms/phone or an email service that is pretty much 100% reliable.
Take a look at some of the SMS providers like Twilio who give you web based APIs for sending SMS messages. There is also an API called the OneAPI that is currently available in Canada but will be in other regions soon. You can use this to send SMS messages through a html API.
For email, take a look at some of the providers listed by programmable web, there are a bunch, for example Yahoo lets you send messages via their API.
Yes make sure call back to sender for confirmation,...
check on my DMStar CBuilder6 system.
it fetch filtered email and sms QFree ordering system.
Every minute or so will auto print out onto docket dot matrix printer as soon order received.
https://sites.google.com/site/dmsqfree/tastykebabs
or google it with tasty kebabs qfree
https://sites.google.com/site/dmsqfree/
E C and simple for small retaillers, no register of sensitive personal details needed.
Using an old Nokia Mobile with prepaid $20.00 per year(free sms) connected into PC USB port,...
cheer.
I need to be able to send a pre-formatted email or SMS text message programmatically from within an iphone app. Can this be done? I have looked at apple's MFMailComposeViewController class, but this "provides a standard interface that manages the editing and sending an email message" and the MFMessageComposeViewController class also has it's own "standard system interface for composing SMS text messages". These allow you to present an interface to the user where they have to fill in all the data and then explicitly press a send button.
I cannot use this boilerplate functionality.
I need to be able to send a message without presenting any interface to the user. I know this sounds evil, but actually it is for a commercial application which needs to communicate to a user group in a central office when users in the field have performed specific actions out in the field.
Has anyone found a solution to this?
After much investigation, I have found that sending emails programmatically, without user intervention, from an iphone application, cannot be implemented using any of the apple frameworks.
Set up a web service you can post to using an HTTP request. If you are posting to only one address this can work very well, although you may want to get the user to input their return mail address.
Otherwise only the standard dialog is available (this relies on using whatever account they've setup on the device).
Here are a few SMTP API's that work on OS X. They might work on iOS as well.
Pantomime
MailCore
EdMessage
Only Possible via Web Interface, you can not hide the Interface , this is as per apple Guidlines to Developer and as per documentation
Looking for a solution to such a problem, I found something interesting here: How to send mail from iphone app without showing MFMailComposeViewController?
I hope this will be useful!
This is standard not possible. If you can't use the standard dialog you need to use SMTP.
SMS is the same, use the dialog of use a webbased sms service (most of these cost some money).
I have no experience with iOS, but I have enough experience with email protocols to say I'd be very surprised if a client application could send email without accessing a server. More than likely, the email will be sent using the SMTP protocol and therefore must be sent using an SMTP server. Choosing how you connect to that server is about the only option you have. You could connect to a server-side script (such as php) to generate and send the email, or you may be able to create a socket and connect directly to port 25 on the SMTP server and still generate the email from you client application.
Check out:
RFC 5321 at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321
SMTP on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol
You could always do a low level telnet using SMTP protocol to a known mail server to send a message. I don't know if Apple will reject the app, but SMTP is damned simple.
Does anyone know of a free, anonymous smtp service? I want to give users of my app the ability to occasionally send me an anon email without having to configure a server of enter their email account. I guess I could setup a gmail account for this purpose and embed the credentials in the app but I hope it won't be necessary. In case it sways your answer, this is a thick client (.NET Console) app.
I think that what you're asking for is called an open relay.
If there were such a thing, wouldn't it immediately be swamped by spammers?
You might be better off setting up some kind of commenting tool on your website, that sends you an email with the contents of whatever form the user submits. Then if you go that far, it shouldn't be difficult to add a form to your app that automatically makes the full HTTP request (transparent to the user, in the background).
If you run your own mail server, you can simply configure the app to deliver mail directly to it. Many web hosting companies also provide mail hosting if you don't want to run it on your own hardware. Gmail via Google Apps for your domain might be an option. It's free. But their anti-spam measures might prevent delivery. Better to have a server you can control, I think. Bottom line, though, is you don't need an anonymous SMTP relay server to get the job done.