The YubiKey – Yes, you need one!

OTP-generator and password manager

The YubiKey – Yes, you need one!

It took me about 10 seconds to get sold on the idea behind the YubiKey. Basically, its a USB stick that emulates a keyboard and have a dual purpose button. Depending on how long you hold your finger on the button you will get either a one time use password, or a static password that is repeated. Essentially, when these keys are coupled with a service that supports them, you will have two factor authentication that can be very difficult to crack.

The YubiKey NEO adds NFC capabilities so that you can use it with your NFC enabled phone to submit login credentials.

I think such a device is a brilliant companion in a life where you have to work hard to manage your online identities and accounts while retaining  a strong level of security.

YubiKey_body-602x412

To me, this thing is a no brainer. For $25 (50$ for the NEO), you get a very affordable way to enable tow-way authentication on logins that are only designed for single authentication. The device itself is also supposedly extremely durable, which is an added benefit. This thing could potentially ease my mind a lot when using services such as PayPal or others who store and manage sensitive information. There are a ton of other use cases as well, and several different product versions to accommodate these. For instance, the Nano, which is designed to permanently sit in your USB port. Tap the yellow edge that sticks out to generate a OTP.

Once I get my NEO (currently out of stock but should be shipped in a few weks), Ill post some impressions and thoughts in some sort of review.

  • Dimitris Sevastakis

    this sounds kind of cool. but lets see if i get this right.. you sign up on this company’s website to create an id where you also register the password that you want to store. When you want to log in, you enter the flash drive, press the button, which send signal to the Yubi server, authenticates your credentials, then acts as a keyboard input and inserts the password to the selected field?

    • Untouchab1e

      To be honest, I am not entirely sure how that part of the Yubikey works, but I am more interested in the OTP stuff anyways. I know Google is working on integrating Yubikey functionality into Chrome, so that alone is a good enough reason for me to get one :)

      • Dimitris Sevastakis

        i’ll struggle a bit more to understand how this works.. What i don’t understand right now is if it actually changes your gmail (for example) password every time you use this, or it changes your Yubi auth token everytime.

« »