Description: I received my GitHub-themed U2F Yubikey this week. U2F is an open, standardized protocol for allowing people to authenticate with a device. It hasn& …
I received my GitHub-themed U2F Yubikey this week. U2F is an open, standardized protocol for allowing people to authenticate with a device. It hasn’t been around long, but there are already strong efforts to get people to use it.
If you’ve used the Google Authenticator app, you’ll see the utility of a U2F key as it’s much smaller than a smartphone. Getting it to work is as simple as inserting the key and pressing a button. A majority of implementations, and there aren’t many, are web services like Google and GitHub. Yubico has produced a pam-u2f module that allows you to hook in U2F authentication to PAM. PAM is what Linux uses to allow adding and customizing various authentication mechanisms.
If you are worried about potentially locking yourself out of your machine, do not continue .