A Yubikey is a small (about 3cm x 1cm x 2mm) passive USB device. When plugged into the USB port of any PC, it presents itself as a standard USB HID keyboard and, when the capacitive ‘button’ on the Yubikey is pressed, the device emits a character string which implements a one-time password (OTP).
Ignoring, for now, the details of the contents of the string, the point is that, if the string can be correctly handled as a OTP by the receiving server, the entire system is platform independent (more-or-less every PC or laptop has a USB port), and very easy to use.
Ok – so what does the ‘string’ look like? In fact, the Yubikey can operate in two different modes: either the standard proprietary ‘Yubico OTP’ mode, or ‘OATH-HOTP’ mode. (Aside: note, not ‘OATH-TOTP’: the Yubikey is unpowered, and so doesn’t have a on-board clock.) We’re currently using and testing the standard mode, though it might be that later on we move to OATH-HOTP for reasons of server-side compatability with software OTP producers.
In standard mode, then, and using its default settings, the Yubikey produces a 44 character text string in which the first 12 characters are a public id string, and the final 32 characters are an AES-encrypted OTP. Here (taken from the Yubikey manual) is an example of the output when a Yubikey is pressed three times in succession:
fifjgjgkhchbirdrfdnlnghhfgrtnnlgedjlftrbdeut fifjgjgkhchbgefdkbbditfjrlniggevfhenublfnrev fifjgjgkhchblechfkfhiiuunbtnvgihdfiktncvlhck <-12 chars-><---------- 32 chars ---------->
You can see that the public id of the Yubikey here is fifjgjgkhchb.
What’s the content of the encrypted OTP? In essence, it’s nothing more than a monotonically-increasing integer. Authentication works as follows:
- Each Yubikey has a unique (symmetric) AES key.
- All such keys are shared between the Yubikeys, and the authentication server.
- On the authentication server, the AES keys are mapped to the public ids of the Yubikeys.
- On receipt of an OTP, the authentication server selects the appropriate AES key, decrypts the payload and, if it finds that the integer contained in the payload is larger than any previously presented by the Yubikey, authentication succeeds.