To get it to work, I have to remove my phone from its case and the YubiKey from my keyring and clumsily mash them together a few times until it finally registers. One thing I did find a bit annoying, though, is that the NFC communication between my YubiKey and OnePlus 5T is pretty spotty. But with YubiKey, I just have to remember to hold onto this little device that’s smaller than a stick of gum and fits on a keyring. This is great for me, because I have a weird Android setup, and so I’m frequently factory-resetting my phone, meaning I’d normally have to go through the hassle of setting up all my 2FA accounts again. What I like the most about Yubico Authenticator is that it works the same across multiple devices, as long as you’re using the same YubiKey. (Note that Yubico Authenticator doesn’t seem to support iOS, but it runs on desktops and Android, and is even open source on F-Droid.)

a replacement for Google Authenticator, Authy, FreeOTP, etc. Just download the Yubico Authenticator app, plug in your YubiKey, and now your YubiKey is an OTP app, i.e. One thing that pleasantly surprised me about YubiKey is that you can even use it for websites that don’t support U2F devices. (I use Firefox as my main browser, so I can confirm that this works across a variety of websites.) Currently this is only supported in Chrome, but in Firefox you can also set 2f to true in about:config and it works just fine. YubiKey is especially nice for sites like Google, GitHub, and Dropbox, because it runs directly in the browser using the FIDO U2F standard. I’ve only tested it on Android, but apparently iOS has some support too. The YubiKey Neo, which is the one I got, also supports NFC, so you can use it on a phone or tablet as well. (Although it’s funny how Mac pops up a window saying, “Set up your keyboard…”) Interestingly, it does this by pretending to be a keyboard, which means it doesn’t require any special drivers. I’ve been really happy with it so far – enough to write a blog post about it.īasically, YubiKey works like this: whenever you need to do two-factor authentication (2FA), you just plug this little wafer into a USB port and tap a button, and it types out your one-time pass code. I recently picked up a YubiKey, because we use them at work and I was impressed with how simple and easy-to-use they are.

Yubi keys