This month’s talk will cover the concept of multi-factor authentication, as well as how to implement it at a low cost and free (as in libre) software compatible way with the Yubikey.
Multi-factor authentication is an old security concept which is gaining interest and adoption in recent years as the need for strong security and authentication grows throughout the computing world. By leveraging multi-factor authentication one can vastly improve the security of a system with a minimal impact to users.
Unfortunately traditional multi-factor authentication systems such as RSA tokens and SecureID cards are highly proprietary and extremely expensive. This has limited the use of this approach to robust user authentication to large corporations and governments.
The Yubikey is starting to change that however. Yubikeys are low cost devices with a completely open specification and open source client and back-end solutions. This allows just about anybody to offer a powerful enhancement to their system’s security.