Swedish company Yubico, which manufactures USB devices that provide two factor authentication FOR online accounts, has introduced what it says is the first such device to support both USB-C and Apple Lightning connectors.
Tim Murphy, Yubico’s regional manager for Australia and New Zealand, said the new device, the YubiKey 5Ci would provide a much needed single root of trust— an external hardware authenticator that identifies the person accessing an account as being the rightful owner — when users increasing have multiple desktop and mobile devices.
The YubiKey 5CI can be plugged into the Lightning port on an iOS device to provide direct two factor authentication for 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, Idaptive, Keeper Security, LastPass, and Okta apps and for other online services via the Brave iOS browser app.
Supported logins on the Brave browser include Bitbucket.org, GitHub.com, Login.gov, Twitter.com, and 1Password.com. Monkton Rebar and XTN also support the YubiKey 5Ci in their latest software development kits. Yubico says it anticipates Dropbox, SecMaker, and other iOS applications will add support for the YubiKey 5Ci.
Yubico offers a mobile SDK for iOS, along with implementation guides and other information at developers.yubico.com/yubikey5ci.
For laptops and mobiles with a USB-C port, Yubico says the 5Ci is supported by the hundreds of applications — listed in its catalogue — that support other YubiKey variants.
The 5Ci is one of two new additions to the YubiKey product set. The other, the YubiKey 5C NFC is a USB-C device with an inbuilt NFC chip that can be used with NFC enabled mobiles and any iOS, Android, Windows and MacOS device with a USB-C connector. It is due for release in early October.
All Yubico devices support FIDO2/WebAuthn, FIDO U2F, OTP (one-time password), PIV (Smart Card), and OpenPGP authentication. They are touch sensitive to confirm that log-in credentials are being entered by a human and not by malware.
The YubiKey 5CI costs $US70 from Yubico’s web site.
