On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial posted by author Younes Rafie showing you how to secure your Laravel application with 2FA (two-factor authentication) via SMS messages. In this example they make use of the Twilio SMS handling to send the message to the end user's device.

While everyone is concerned about their application’s security, few take it seriously and take the plunge. The first thing you’ll notice when learning about this is that two factor authentication (2FA) is the go-to solution as a first step.

Although there have been some serious problems with using text messages as a second factor, it’s definitely safer than a plain username and password combination, given that many users tend to use popular and easy to guess passwords for critical services such as payments, chat, emails, etc. In this article, we’re going to build two factor authentication into a Laravel application using Twilio SMS as the second factor.

The tutorial then starts by explaining what the end result will look like - a basic username/password login system that will require a code (from the SMS message) to continue into the account. They walk you through the creation of a new Homestead instance and installation/configuration of the new Laravel project. It then shows the updates you'll need to make to migrations and the models to handle the storage of the SMS tokens. It also shows the Blade templates to create the code entry view and error output in case of a code validation failure.

The tutorial then integrates Twilio's PHP SDK via a provider and provides a screencast of the end result.