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by moreati 3915 days ago
A few U2F details worth mentioning

Browser support is currently limited to Chrome, and possible Windows Edge*

For now it only works with USB. Bluetooth and NFC specs are out, browser support is the bottleneck

The protocol is public/private key based, with the private key strongly encouraged to be in tamper resistant/evident storage.

The protocol is authentication method agnostic. It doesn't care if you use a USB key, a retinal scan, a pin or divination.

You could write a software only authenticator if you wanted, but servers could detect that (and reject it if they chose to) through the attestation certificate you provided. You can't pretend to be a brand X authenticator, because only company X will have the private key(s) matching the attestation certs to sign (batches) of model X authenticator.

Yubikeys are just one implementation of a U2F authenticator. In theory GitHub now works with any present/future authenticators that talks U2F (modulo browser support) e.g. an iPhone+TouchID+NokNok SDK, a Pebble watch+app, an Android Phone+$your_app, an NFC implant, m-of-n wearables

* Microsoft announced something U2F related for Windows 10, I never got to the bottom of what exactly

For more detail I did a talk at EuroPython this year https://moreati.github.io/passwordspain/#/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSTsgldazSU

1 comments

Thanks for the link to your presentation. I'm currently implementing this in a Rails app and had a bit of a hard time to grok U2F with only the info from Fido site. Your talk will make it easier for my colleagues to understand U2F :)
Yes and I am using that. Thanks!