So, my understanding so far is that Github (or anyone, in general) will provide a private key consisting of 24 alphanum chars. Github also has a copy of the key.

To authenticate, a password is generated based on the private key, which acts as a seed. That seed is combined with a timestamp in order to generate a password, which has an expiry time of about 1 minute. The algorithm that generates the password is a standard one, so once you know the algorithm, you can generate valid passwords.

Linux provides "oathtool", which is suitable for such a purpose.

Is my understanding correct on this?