We’ve all been guilty at some stage of re-using passwords, using poor passwords or not using security options. Yubikey is making the use of 2FA even easier for your critical accounts with the release of the 5C NFC. It’s the first device available with both NFC and USB-C to cater to the current market.
It’s an advance on their previous models where a USB-C converter would be required, and the NFC (with widespread availability) in the current market makes life quick and easy. From a personal perspective, having seen friends lose access to critical accounts: the cost and few extra seconds for login — although with SMS, or code retrieval this point is moot — are nothing compared to the pain of losing personal data.
The YubiKey 5C NFC comes at a time when the need for simple, yet strong authentication is on the rise globally. COVID-related phishing attacks continue to surge in the context of remote work, and millions of corporate-owned devices are now shared with families and home networks, making it critical for companies to secure users from any location and machine. Meanwhile, the increasing overlap of personal and work responsibilities demands solutions that are easy to use and non-prohibitive for end users.
Yubikey hardware generally is able to connect to multiple authentication types (FIDO2 and WebAuthn, FIDO U2F, PIV (smart card), OATH-HOTP and OATH-TOTP (hash-based and time-based one-time passwords), OpenPGP, YubiOTP, and challenge-response) meaning they have genuine versatility, not just mainstream (Google, Apple etc) but also with password managers and online forums such as Github for developers.
We’ll be taking a look at the 5C NFC in the coming weeks, what would you like to know about it?
I assume it supports Windows Hello but no bluetooth, I’ll wait for a reasonable device with the lot 🙂