OTP Broadcaster : Automating OTP login scenarios

OTP login is a common feature in most of the applications today. While it was implemented for safer authentication and transaction security, it is a pain for the test engineers to automate these type of scenarios.

In this article I will be explaining how I solved this problem when working on a project for which we had to automate multiple OTP login scenarios.

OTP BROADCASTER:

OTP broadcaster, as I call it, is a simple application with mainly 2 component,

1. An android app which reads the OTP from the device on which it is installed.
2. A node application which acts as a webhook to receive these OTP and store it in a mongo db server.

For this demo, I had deployed my node application on heroku and for mongo DB, I have used Mongo DB atlas.

You can find the link to the github repository below:

• OTP Broadcaster Android app : https://github.com/ShinuMathew/otp-broadcaster
• OTP Broadcaster webhook : https://github.com/ShinuMathew/otp-broadcaster-webhook

EXPLAINATION:

• The OTPBroadcaster android app needs to be installed on the android device which is registered for receiving the OTP.
• The app’s OTPReceiver module fetches the OTP from the incoming message.

• Once the OTP is fetched, BroadcastHelper publishes the the OTP to the server using the webhook api.

• The consumer application fetches the latest OTP’s received by the webhook within 100 seconds and filters the expected OTP using the producers ID or number.

Conclusion:

Although there are alternative solutions to solve this scenario, one of it being Twilio’s SMS service, the above mentioned is a free implementation and mimics a real user kind behaviour.