YubiKey by Yubico

Yubico is a privately held company headquartered in Palo Alto, originally founded in Sweden in 2007 to create a secure, simple, and affordable alternative to password authentication. Despite long-standing predictions about the “death of passwords,” passwords persist and the number of credentials continues to grow as online services and access devices proliferate. Many stronger alternatives fail to reach broad adoption due to high equipment costs, poor interoperability, vendor lock-in, limited scalability, and complicated deployments that require adapters, drivers, and client software.

Yubico’s early success came from the original YubiKey: a plug-and-play, one-touch, driverless one-time password token built on an open and extensible infrastructure with components published as open source. A single key could secure multiple independent services, addressing deployment and scalability friction. Over time, Yubico expanded to multiple YubiKey generations and models with different interfaces (USB and NFC, with Bluetooth in development) and support for numerous authentication methods and protocols: Yubico and OATH OTP (HOTP/TOTP), PIV, OpenPGP, and FIDO U2F. This allows one device to replace multiple OTP tokens and smartcards while also strengthening existing password logins via a hardware-based second factor.

Beyond hardware manufacturing and distribution, Yubico promotes strong authentication through developer and partner ecosystems, cloud OTP validation (YubiCloud), and open source tools for authentication, encryption, and digital signatures. The company participates in standards bodies including W3C, OpenID Foundation, and the FIDO Alliance, contributing to U2F and ensuring modern YubiKeys are FIDO-certified. Key strengths include driverless hardware, durable battery-free form factors, broad protocol support, and backward compatibility, while challenges include mixed hardware generations across models and the lack of iOS-compatible NFC products.

• Yubico is privately held and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
• The company was founded in Sweden in 2007.
• Yubico has offices in the USA, UK, and Sweden.
• Yubico has over 100,000 customers in 150 countries.
• The original YubiKey was a one-time password token with a USB connector.
• YubiKeys do not require drivers or client software to operate.
• FIDO U2F currently requires a compatible web browser, with Google Chrome supported and Mozilla Firefox in development.
• The fourth-generation YubiKey platform supports stronger cryptographic algorithms such as RSA 4096.
• YubiKey 4 measures 45×18×3 mm and weighs 3 g.
• YubiKey 4 Nano measures 12×13×3 mm and weighs 1 g.

• “Security experts have been predicting ‘death to passwords’ for over a decade.”
• “Passwords are still a reality we have to deal with.”
• “It provided completely plug and play one-touch operation without any client software.”
• “A single YubiKey was enough to secure multiple independent online services.”
• “Security Key is a specialized model with all functionality except FIDO U2F support removed to reduce costs.”
• “Since 2013, Yubico is a board member of the FIDO Alliance.”
• “All modern YubiKeys are FIDO-certified, which ensures their current and future compatibility with all other devices from the FIDO ecosystem.”
• “This unique combination of strong and flexible cryptography, future-proof standard support and consistent backward compatibility… makes YubiKeys an ideal tool for large-scale strong authentication projects.”