If the people I know tweet enough about something, eventually I’m bound to breakdown and just buy the thing. It happened with the Intel NUC, and now it’s happened with Yubikey. The Yubikey is a USB-based security device that can do a lot of things, but in my case I just need it to act as a security key for a number of websites such as GitHub, Google, and Twitter. Much to my dismay it did not work exactly as I expected right out of the box on my openSUSE-based laptop.
With recent versions of Firefox Quantum, basically Firefox released over the past couple years, Chrome/Chromium, and Opera (apparenlty) a Yubikey can be used directly within web browsers as an external security key. In my case, every time I tried to configure the device on sites loaded in either Chromium or Firefox, I simply couldn’t make it work. The Yubikey would instead spit out a random string of garbage. This is one valid mode of the Yubikey, where it acts like a pretend keyboard and generates One-Time Passwords (OTP). In my case, I wanted it to act like a Universal 2-Factor authentication device (U2F).
First try was using the Yubikey manager to poke at the device. This application
can be installed with zypper in yubikey-manager-qt. The installed binary is
frustratingly not called yubikey-manager but instead is named
ykman-gui. With that hurdle overcome, I tried to inspect the “FIDO2”
application on the Yubikey but that consistently fail.
Utilizing a mixture of “opensuse” “yubikey” and “u2f” I stumbled into an
openSUSE Buildservice link for a promising package named u2f-host. As luck
would have it, the u2f-host package ended up being the missing link between
Firefox and my Yubikey. After executing zypper in u2f-host and restarting
Firefox, I was able to successfully register and use my Yubikey across a myriad
of websites!
A tiny (nano, actually) Christmas miracle! :)