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Ask HN: Alternatives to Yubikey?

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41–50 of 91 posts

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Yubikey?

#44
post #17

It's worth considering: almost nobody who uses Yubikeys loves them, but they are by a wide margin the tokens experts recommend most.

I use my yubikey and I love it. I have it set up to do GPG, SSH, TOTP, and U2F and it works great. It is worlds better then any other Smart Card or second factor out there, and U2F is literally just plug it in and tap it.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Yubikey?

#45

SecurID has been the gold standard for more than a decade. Not to dismiss YubiKey but companies that can afford 2 factor and take security seriously already have SecurID for a long time.

SecurID is just an expensive TOTP implementation (although a very established one, as you noted)

That "gold standard" required reissuing 40 millions of devices in 2011 due to a single server breach. Lockheed-Martin was apparently really, really happy about it, too.

If that's your desired level of security, just use any TOTP authenticator app on your smartphone.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Yubikey?

#46
post #44
post #17

It's worth considering: almost nobody who uses Yubikeys loves them, but they are by a wide margin the tokens experts recommend most.

I use my yubikey and I love it. I have it set up to do GPG, SSH, TOTP, and U2F and it works great. It is worlds better then any other Smart Card or second factor out there, and U2F is literally just plug it in and tap it.

The U2F bit is a dream, yes. The rest of it not so much.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Yubikey?

#47
post #44
post #17

It's worth considering: almost nobody who uses Yubikeys loves them, but they are by a wide margin the tokens experts recommend most.

I use my yubikey and I love it. I have it set up to do GPG, SSH, TOTP, and U2F and it works great. It is worlds better then any other Smart Card or second factor out there, and U2F is literally just plug it in and tap it.

Have you got a writeup of the ssh setup methodology you used?

(I've tried scouting around, but not found anything clear yet. Someone's done native support in ssh, but the patch set is hung up on licensing issues and technical quibbles[1], and some of the PAM-based setups seem to require cut-and-paste of crypto strings on every login.)

[1] https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2319

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Yubikey?

#50
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is largely with their docs, or lack thereof. Just figuring out how to use one as a token for ssh is incredibly painful. The docs are very "enterprise," meaning half-done, overly complicated, confusing, scattered, etc.

It is extraordinarily annoying to set up a Y4 for SSH. We use gpg-agent in ssh-agent compat mode.

It would be better if they supported the OpenSSH PKI format.
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