5 ms·
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).
by aborsy 4y ago
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).
- bberrry 4y agoVery. 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.
- gonesilent 4y agoUS government had a nice little swedish cryptography company there for a bit too...
- bschne 4y agoDo you mean Swiss (classic!) or was there another one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
- steve1977 4y agoThey were a tiny Swedish company…
- Namidairo 4y ago> It's not a faceless corporation with a Chinese PO Box. On this note, are Feitian still the OEM for the Google Titan keys?
- JoachimS 4y agoTiny is a bit misleading. The turnover is about 100 MUSD. The company has about 300 employees, with offices in all regions of the world and a lot of R&D in the USA.
- bberrry 4y agoI wasn't aware they had grown that much. Thanks for the correction
- JoachimS 4y agoIf you are looking for a tiny, Swedish company working in a similar area as Yubico, there is Tillits AB. Tillitis is a spin off from the Swedish VPN provider Mullvad. In contrast to Yubikeys, The Tillitis TKey as well as tools, device verification etc is 100% open source. https://tillitis.se/ https://tillitis.se/ https://github.com/tillitis https://github.com/tillitis https://mullvad.net/en https://mullvad.net/en (Full disclosure: I work for Tillitis.)
- FeistySkink 4y agoIs the TKey tamper-proof?
- JoachimS 4y agoNo, not yet. Physical attacks are out of scope for the TKey1, even if we have some mechanisms in play which try to extend the time and effort required to perform a successful evil maid-attack extracting the Unique Device Secret (UDS). See the threat model for the release: https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1/blob/main/doc/threat_model/threat_model.md https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1/blob/main/doc/thre... The current casing is fairly tamper evident (it will break), but we do not yet use real, tamper evident sealing. We are looking at tamper sealing for future versions. And ways to further protect against physical attacks.
- belter 4y agoWhen you do, please think about a special price for existing customers ;-)
- jtvjan 4y agoThe key costs 880 SEK. That's about 78 euros or 85 dollars. It's designed to be future proof, with applications being uploaded to the device by the host. The website feels a bit cramped with all the large text on desktop, like it was only tested on phones
- 4y ago
- aborsy 4y agoThanks for the info! The construction quality of Yubikeys has been good in my experience. I was just worried about the closed source proprietary firmware in a security product (including the random number generators, where issues were discovered in the past). But Yubikeys are used in various companies and apparently in some branches of governments too, thus must have been vetted by their security teams (though there could be different lines of firmware or products for different clients. People say there is not much benefit to purchasing FIPS-compliant Yubikeys. Neglecting the approved algorithms and features, is the firmware the same as that in non-FIPS security keys?)
- INTPenis 4y agoToday there are more trustworthy alternatives. Yubikey is great for a very limited set of uses. But it lacks programmability and openness. Something tillitis key has. Tkey has a steeper learning curve because they're programmable, but they're also 100% open source software and hardware.
- panny 4y ago>But it lacks programmability For a lot of us, that's a feature, not a bug.
- INTPenis 4y agoSure, I mean there will always be two main groups of clients on the market. Those who trust in openness and those who don't care, or even distrust it. So there will always be a place for Yubikey. But afaik there is nothing else out there right now like the tillitis key, programmable, 100% open, and already shipping.
- panny 4y agoIf you have a key that can't be reflashed, source code is irrelevant. It may as well be hardwired circuits. Even Richard Stallman agrees on this point. I don't want a field programmable key, because it expands the attack surface.If you like weakened security, that's fine.
- palata 4y agoI always wonder: isn't programmability a security risk? What if a malware puts a backdoor in my programmable key?