What if I lose my key?Īll of that sounds great, but I can hear most of you asking the same question as me when I first looked into them. For me, using a MacBook Pro and iPhone the 5C NFC is my favourite, but I could just as easily use the 5Ci. Yubico have a really good tool on their website that’ll help you pick the best key for you depending on what devices you plan on using it with and how you’d like it to work. The 5Ci on the other hand has a USB-C & lightning connector where as the nano range is designed to discreetly plug into your computer via USB-A or C.
For example the 5C NFC has a USB-C connector, but can also be used with newer Android & Apple phones with their NFC sensors. There are a variety of YubiKeys available depending on what phone and/or computer you’re using. What they mean to you & I is that if you’re using websites that support them, like Twitter, Google and Facebook, just plugging in your YubiKey and tapping it authenticates you without having to open another app or type in another code. In addition to handling one-time passwords they also support a variety of new authentication protocols with cool names that’ll mean nothing to most like FIDO & U2F. To be fair, that’s just one way of using a YubiKey. All the YubiKeys are doing is shifting the storage of the secret tokens to generate the codes to hardware instead of virtually. The codes are displayed via the Yubico Authenticator app, which if you’ve used Google Authenticator, looks & works pretty much identically. When you turn that key by plugging it into your computer or tapping it against your phone it unlocks access to the special one-time codes stored on it. Using the simplest of simple explanations these guys act as a key. In fact SMS is probably the worst way and has led to many of the major security breaches in the past decade.Įnter Yubico and the YubiKey. Those codes are only valid for a short amount of time and that extra layer of security is great, but they can also be easily accessed by hackers, especially if you receive them via email or SMS. To explain that we’ll need to take about two-factor authentication or 2FA as it’s more widely known and those annoying websites that send us codes to type in after our passwords via a text, email or apps like Google Authenticator and Authy. I’ll do my best to explain what they are and why you should consider using them to tighten up your online security & safety. Now if you have no idea what these are, don’t be afraid you’re definitely not alone.
Today we’re taking a look at the YubiKey 5 series from Yubico in particular the YubiKey 5C NFC and the YubiKey 5Ci.
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