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Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

yubico.com

11–20 of 222 posts

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very. They are a tiny Swedish company that pay for top talent, are quite active and hands-on in the netsec community. It's not a faceless corporation with a Chinese PO Box.

US government had a nice little swedish cryptography company there for a bit too...

Do you mean Swiss (classic!) or was there another one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#12

I have an irrational concern about using security products from a company post-merger or acquisition. It has never ended well for me as an anecdotal user. Going public is taking that worry even further. Make keys, sell keys. The end. What's there to raise funding for? Build yet another password vault?

building a legal team to fight shareholder lawsuits!

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#13
post #5
post #2

Anyone has insights into how trustworthy is Yubico? Their firmware is opaque, not shared outside the company, so is their hardware (important for RNGs etc).

Very. They are a tiny Swedish company that pay for top talent, are quite active and hands-on in the netsec community. It's not a faceless corporation with a Chinese PO Box.

They were a tiny Swedish company…

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#14

I have an irrational concern about using security products from a company post-merger or acquisition. It has never ended well for me as an anecdotal user. Going public is taking that worry even further. Make keys, sell keys. The end. What's there to raise funding for? Build yet another password vault?

This is not really a merger because the other company is a “blank check” holding company (a.k.a. SPAC). It has no operations, it just holds a bunch of money put in by investors who want to find a private company that wants to go public.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#16
post #8

Time for an open source u2f token.

Well an interesting new approach to security tokens just launched: the tillitis tkey[1]. It has open source hardware and software. Unlike other security tokens that are based around storing your key where it can't be read, the tillitis tkey doesn't have any persistent storage and instead calculates your private key by hashing the program you've loaded onto the key, a user-supplied secret, and a per-device random secret. I'm excited to see what people will do with it. I don't think a u2f application exists for it yet, just an ed25519 ssh agent so far, but it just launched this week.

[1] https://www.tillitis.se/tkey/

Otherwise, in a more traditional yubikey-replacement design, I've had my eye on the onlykey but their github has very little activity which makes me worried its a dead project.

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#17
post #8

Time for an open source u2f token.

The idea of authenticator hardware is inherently hostile to DIY and open source because you cannot produce or extract a keypair to generate valid attestation statements. Unless you are part of the cartel of course.

https://w3c.github.io/webauthn/#attestation-statement

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#18
post #3

Time to crank the monetizing tap, add a mandatory monthly subscription to everything and deprecate well-working gear

You could buy a programmable open source security key instead, they recently opened their shop. https://tillitis.se/ Some of the people behind Mullvad VPN are associated with it.

They are not just associated with it. It’s a spin-off and is owned by the same company. From there FAQ:

> Tillitis is wholly owned by Amagicom AB and is a spin-off from the sister company Mullvad VPN

Re: Yubico is merging with ACQ Bure and intends to go public

#19
post #15
post #8

Time for an open source u2f token.

Like SoloKeys? The Solo 2 has a firmware written in Rust: https://solokeys.com

Really like the SoloKeys... but once you go at the level of small or large MNC they do business with people like YubiCo etc only. Never with tiny shops. (Sad)
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