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YubiKey 4C

yubico.com

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Re: YubiKey 4C

#152

I REALLY wish it were possible to use one of these devices without using your hands. I'm quadriplegic and would love to use one of these to unlock my computer, bank passwords etc etc. But you have to touch a finger to almost all of them to trigger the OTP, or whichever authentication and they happen to be using. I would absolutely love to be able to lock and unlock my Mac without an able-bodied person helping me, bec…

Since it's a capacitive touch device, you really just need something conductive to touch the pad and connect it to "ground".

Maybe someone you know could take the yubikey device, attach a wire to it, then connect up a relay or something that could be controlled (using whatever interface you already have - I'm not that familiar with such medical devices) to activate the relay. When the switch contacts close, the other side of the relay could be connected to an earth-grounded point. That should activate the yubikey (I believe).

Note that the wire and relay and such will need to be shielded as well (to prevent stray capacitance - like somebody walking by or such - activating it). Coaxial cable like that used for oscilloscope leads would be great, and put the relay inside a metal box (and connect the shielding of the cable to the box).

Hmm - this is getting more complicated than I thought - but I think the basics are there. Here are some other links that might help as well:

http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/CapacitiveSensor (has a nice diagram/schematic of how these form a "circuit" for the microcontroller - this may or may not be what the yubikey uses)

A couple of PDF app notes from Texas Instruments on implementing capacitive sensing:

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/snoa952/snoa952.pdf

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/snoa926a/snoa926a.pdf

Good luck, and I hope this helps or leads somewhere for you!

Re: YubiKey 4C

#153

I REALLY wish it were possible to use one of these devices without using your hands. I'm quadriplegic and would love to use one of these to unlock my computer, bank passwords etc etc. But you have to touch a finger to almost all of them to trigger the OTP, or whichever authentication and they happen to be using. I would absolutely love to be able to lock and unlock my Mac without an able-bodied person helping me, bec…

Why not run an operating system that does let you use accessibility software at the login screen?

My friend, if you could find me an operating system that can do that, and then once inside the OS enable me to use every single function of the operating system like an able-bodied person in the way the Apple's does I'll give you a small prize.

I would absolutely love to use free and open source software for both my operating system and everything else, but only Apple provides an experience for people with profound disabilities that even comes close to the experience normal people have with their computers.

This reply might come across as snarky, but it isn't and I really have tried to find other operating systems that would allow me to do this. Not found any yet in a decade.

Re: YubiKey 4C

#154
post #68
post #47

I don't think that the people complaining about the price of this key appreciate all that it can do. Most of those people would probably be better off with the cheaper FIDO U2F Security Key. I haven't found anything else that manages RSA Keys, TOTP auth and U2F in a single package. I'm going to buy this because it plugs into my pixel phone and it seems like it'd be more secure and convenient than my current Neo with…

Annoying nerd pedantry: It's only sort of doing TOTP (Yubikeys don't have batteries, so need a software client to provide the clock), and on a slack with almost 300 crypto nerds in it, I don't know any of them that use the Y4 for TOTP (I'm preparing myself to be surprised in a minute when someone there reads this). TOTP is something you do on your phone.

I only do TOTP on my phone. The Yubi Authenticator app is a drop-in replacement for Google Authenticator, but it adds significant security because the keys are stored offline in the yubikey and the crypto is done in the fob. Your phone is relegated to sending the time and displaying the OTP, which greatly reduces the attack surface of a standard OTP app.

The actual usage is exactly the same as Google Authenticator with 1 more step (NFC with NEO or plugging in the yubikey 4) to get the OTP.

Re: YubiKey 4C

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they've chosen the wrong hardware. This doesn't make it more secure, it just explains why their product is insecure. If the hardware is more resistant to hardware and software attacks, it seems odd to then deem it less secure just because you don't get source code that isn't guaranteed to correspond to a given binary. > reproducable builds There's so much literature on how this methodology fails, some of it qu…

>If the hardware is more resistant to hardware and software attacks, it seems odd to then deem it less secure just because you don't get source code that isn't guaranteed to correspond to a given binary. It may be, but there's no guarantee it behaves the way it claims to. There's no guarantee it's not backdoored. There are powerful actors involved in these areas. >There's so much literature on how this methodology fa…

> It may be, but there's no guarantee it behaves the way it claims to. There's no guarantee it's not backdoored. There are powerful actors involved in these areas.

It renders your point about source code moot though, doesn't it. Security is ultimately the art of trust propagation.

> Care to cite some of this literature?

The most famous discourse here is the "untrustworthy compiler problem." Most famous citation is by none other than Thompson: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...

Trust chains are their weakest link, and people often put a lot of trust in compilers without really asking what it is doing. Not unlike crypto, we're told not to roll our own.

People have proposed ways around this, but they're not very good (http://imgur.com/a/BWbnU#0). The moral of the story is that at some point, you extend trust to someone. Security is never absolute.

Re: YubiKey 4C

#156
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I'm speaking to an audience that is generally pretty good at not being phished.

The available data suggests there are no groups of people who are good at not being phished. The audience here is unlikely to send a check to the Nigerian prince looking to smuggle his money to America, but if you're arguing that we shouldn't trust yubikeys against APT backdoors, we're talking about a much higher quality of phishing. I'll take my odds with yubikeys firmware rather than try to vet every site I enter a…

You should be vetting those sites anyway, especially since you probably were also asked for a password. And it's not exactly hard - just glance up at the address bar.

>The available data

source?

Re: YubiKey 4C

#157

Until these things work well with phones, I can't buy into them. I have a U2F key that I use as a shortcut for accessing things like Google's services. But I am sticking to always using either Google Authenticator or SMS, if it's available, as a primary option. When I am looking at a website in bed on my phone, and my YubiKey is in my laptop downstairs, I can't say I am happy that I can't access my account. I think t…

I think I'm not understanding the problem. I have cloned keys (for backup + two locations), with Yubico Authenticator. Is the problem NFC on iOS or that you don't want to clone your keys?

Re: YubiKey 4C

#158
post #152

I REALLY wish it were possible to use one of these devices without using your hands. I'm quadriplegic and would love to use one of these to unlock my computer, bank passwords etc etc. But you have to touch a finger to almost all of them to trigger the OTP, or whichever authentication and they happen to be using. I would absolutely love to be able to lock and unlock my Mac without an able-bodied person helping me, bec…

Since it's a capacitive touch device, you really just need something conductive to touch the pad and connect it to "ground". Maybe someone you know could take the yubikey device, attach a wire to it, then connect up a relay or something that could be controlled (using whatever interface you already have - I'm not that familiar with such medical devices) to activate the relay. When the switch contacts close, the other…

Thanks for the links, they look really useful and it's only just occurred to me when you pointed it out that when a person such as the key they are completing a circuit. If I could do that in someway that could be unique to me, then that might just be possible to do. I just need to find somebody to do the soldering!. :-)

Re: YubiKey 4C

#159

I REALLY wish it were possible to use one of these devices without using your hands. I'm quadriplegic and would love to use one of these to unlock my computer, bank passwords etc etc. But you have to touch a finger to almost all of them to trigger the OTP, or whichever authentication and they happen to be using. I would absolutely love to be able to lock and unlock my Mac without an able-bodied person helping me, bec…

I'm reminded of the brief experiences I had w/ Greg Priest Dorman and his physical computing setup, which had him attaching keyboards to his hands, and displays to his glasses. This is a really hacky/bespoke idea, and I apologize if I'm being naive, but I wonder if you might be able to string a Yubikey Nano ( https://www.yubico.com/product/yk4nano/ ) via a USB extension cable to someplace accessible to you around you…

I thought of this when the Yubikey first came out, but apparently it needs to be your finger that makes the connection. I'm not sure if that's still the case, because like you I just assumed I could extend the key somewhere around my chin controller and then use the tip of my nose to activate the key. I believe the tip of your nose is actually fairly unique FYI.

But yes, that would be one solution and great minds think alike. :-)

Re: YubiKey 4C

#160
post #146

I REALLY wish it were possible to use one of these devices without using your hands. I'm quadriplegic and would love to use one of these to unlock my computer, bank passwords etc etc. But you have to touch a finger to almost all of them to trigger the OTP, or whichever authentication and they happen to be using. I would absolutely love to be able to lock and unlock my Mac without an able-bodied person helping me, bec…

IIRC, the main reason that accessibility software doesn't have access to login screens is because malicious software has historically used accessibility APIs to steal passwords (e.g. by eavesdropping on a login screen, or by presenting a fake one and then using the accessibility APIs to pass through the password to the real one).

I think you are absolutely correct, and it's a really good reason not to switch the accessibility APIs on until the OS is fully decrypted and loaded.

Yep, right there with you and agree and everything. Still, sucks balls to be disabled in this situation and I'm also fairly sure that Apple has the engineering talent to make this possible. One would hope, anyway!

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