Google Authenticator on Apple devices, certain secrets are not valid

Question

We\'ve incorporated two factor authentication into one of our applications using Google Authenticator. In QA, something really weird turned up. While I managed to fix it,

Answer 1

I was having the same issue as above. It turns out that Google Authenticator doesn't like = signs in the IPhone App, but doesn't complain in Android.

In my case I increased the length of the string before encoding to base32 from 8 chars to 10 chars. This removed the three === at the end of the string. I found this online as to why = signs appear in base32 encoded strings:

The pad character (=) does not have a binary representation in BASE32; it is inserted into the BASE32 text as a placeholder to maintain 40-bit alignment

In your case above the same happened when you added the salt. The second secret you pasted doesn't have ='s at the end.

Hope this help.