YubiKey 1.3.0 and Static YubiKey Passwords Review

There is a new firmware for the YubiKey being beta tested, here is the forum thread about it. They wanted to give out keys to known YubiKey users (those that can produce an OTP) so testing will happen. Natural I signed up and today I got two keys:


The left one is special: It produces a static password, same character sequence every time. While it can not be used to give the strong client authentication of an OTP it absolute has it uses. For example how many characters do you use for your personal computer login (>0 I hope ;-)?

Well, I just made an new user in my old XP environment with a very long password...

Works great while logging in, small trick in registering the password: Since the YubiKey produces an enter after password typed I could not register the static password in the XP widget pushing the green ring since it has to be entered twice and the enter event triggers the completion of the registration, so never got the second chance... What I had to do was to capture the password in notepad and do copy and paste.

Mind you, the robotic enter is a feature: it makes logging in to computer realy smooth once you have registred the password. One think I found after been trying it a few time was that it really is faster to log in this way then typing in a long for human strong password.


My resource post on the YubiKey
My YubiKey review