Update on Yubikey

Steve Gibson has an episode of Security Now (SN143) that is dedicated to the Yubikey. This thing sounds better all the time.  The fact is that I think they we a little caught off guard when they met Steve Gibson.  They were unaware of his reach.  It sounds like the people running Yubico were not fully committed to the direction their company would go in, but they are making those choices now.  The stated intent of the company is to sell the device.  The amount paid for the device depends on how many you buy.  You get 1 for $35 or 1,000,000 for about $5 a piece.  So if you want to play around with 1 or 2 you can or if you want to develop a hugh system around them you could also do that.  The nice part is the software to get these things working is open source now.  So people like me who don’t have a clue about implementing a huge authentication system can play around with it and make it work on a small scale.  Of course, making things work on a small scale is the precursor to making things work on a large scale.  I really like open source software for this reason.  So much software is too costly to even attempt to make work on small projects and this really impairs the ability to learn how it works.  At least for honest people.

Yubikey Follow-Up

I have to say that this device, the Yubikey, looks pretty impressive. I think that it is being marketed more to the business/corporate world as a replacement for any secure login technologies they currently have in place. Of course, if a company is in need of a secure login technology this could be the way to go. I am, however, concerned that a person could end up with a ton of these things that are only good for one website. I am not sure that everyone would want to carry around one for each website that they want to log into. Maybe I am not understanding the concept, but it seems that each site would provide their Yubikey.

Add on:

The Yubikey does support OpenID.  So you could use it with any services that accept OpenID.

Yubikey

On Security Now episode 141, Steve Gibson talks about his finding of the Yubikey.  This thing is made in Sweden and appears to have some value as a security device.  From what I have seen it plugs into a USB port on your computer, which recognizes it as a USB keyboard.  You press the button on the Yubikey and it sends a secure password.  I need to do a little more digging as to how it works exactly.  Steve Gibson was estatic about the device.  The website states that you can buy a sample for 20 Euros and there is a subscription of some kind.  I’ll did a little more and post more info.