two-step verification

[aflac42]

Hi everyone. I really need some help. My son has a Lumia 900 on a GoPhone plan. Everything has worked great. So yesterday I bought him a Lumia 520(big drop off I know) for his birthday and to take it back to college with him. I must have a brain fart because I cant for the life of me get his xbox live account on the new phone. I have several questions 1. I have tried to download the Authenicator app to the 520 it asks for his password and when he puts it in is says wrong password. I got a special code for the authenticator page , put it in the phone and it said it was wrong also.:angry: 2. Do I need to get the authenticator code to his 900 and the go back to 520?
Surely it cant be this difficult. ATT GoPhone Support was useless, they gave me a number to Microsoft and they said to go to Nokia.com. which I couldn't find any support except to schedule a call/appt. tomorrow. Three in the family have 900's and I have a Focus S and are ready to get on the bandwagon for window phone 8, but this is crazy. Thank you for any help.

 

[SwimSwim]

Certain apps and logins don't support the two-step verification code. For those things, you need to login using an app password. You can find more details here.

Also, make sure you properly set-up the authenticator app on the 520. Bear in mind that, once properly set-up, ONLY codes from the 520 will work, the codes generated by the Lumia 900 will be useless. As such, I'd recommend uninstalling the app from the 900, to avoid confusion.

Hope this helps, and kudos to you for showing some concern about your account's security. Most people think I'm nuts due to all my long passwords, and setting up two step verification on everything I can. I'll be the one with the last laugh when their data is compromised.

 

[aflac42]

ok, thanks for getting back to me. I will make sure to uninstall the authenticator on the 900. When we tried to download the authenticator on the 520 it still said we have a bad password. We have doubled checked the password on his live account and changed it to make sure he was using the correct one, but geez nothing is working. He did a final sync with his 900 to Zune, does he need to plug in the phone to the computer? Thanks again

 

[SwimSwim]

ok, thanks for getting back to me. I will make sure to uninstall the authenticator on the 900. When we tried to download the authenticator on the 520 it still said we have a bad password. We have doubled checked the password on his live account and changed it to make sure he was using the correct one, but geez nothing is working. He did a final sync with his 900 to Zune, does he need to plug in the phone to the computer? Thanks again

Again, you need a special app password, this is different from your normal account password. Details instructions for how to set this up can be found in the link above.

This is for security reasons. The whole point of two step verification is that, should your password ever be discovered, you still have another layer of security, one that is more volatile and therefore harder to guess.

An app password gets randomly generated and is authorized to access your account. If you follow the instructions above, your randomly generated app password will be something along the lines of jajdlaiz29hds. You type whatever password it generates in lieu of your normal password. Once you've longed in, generate another password for each service you intend upon using. Once you're done, you're good.

This also means that should an account become compromised, you can deactivate all your active app passwords via your account settings, making sure no one can access any sensitive info.