News
Nitrokey’s new USB key for secure two-factor authentication using FIDO U2F is now available
November 2018 by Marc Jacob
Now it’s finally time to launch our brand-new Nitrokey FIDO U2F. After uncounted hours of hard work, we are very proud to present you our newest product. The Nitrokey FIDO U2F does two things for you: First, it protects your most precious accounts at home and at work. Second, it makes it easy as never before to use two-factor authentication.
You might think "Why do I need two-factor authentication?". It’s simple. Passwords alone are no longer (or have never been) sufficient to secure your accounts and digital identities. Once your password has been guessed, hacked or stolen, you are screwed, so is your account. That is why you need a second factor to log in to your accounts. But app- and especially SMS-based two-factor authentication methods can be inconvenient and insecure. In case a criminal steals your Nitrokey FIDO U2F, the hardware cryptography of our device is robust enough to withstand even attacks using high-end laboratory devices.
With your Nitrokey FIDO U2F, after the initial configuration, you just need to touch the button on the device each time you are logging in to your various accounts. Easy, right? The major web browsers on the major operating systems are compatible with Nitrokey FIDO U2F out of the box: Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Opera; on Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD. No driver or software installation is required.
And you need a compatible website, of course. More and more web services support two-factor authentication with FIDO U2F as well. Thanks to its compatibility with the FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) and WebAuthn standards, we are looking forward to expanding reach and uses cases for our Nitrokey FIDO U2F. You can look up if your preferred web services are already compatible at www.dongleauth.info
Finally, our Nitrokey FIDO U2F can be used for an unlimited amount of user accounts. It comes with an affordable price (€22) and the ease of mind of open hardware and open source software. Hence, you don’t necessarily need to trust us, because you could verify its security yourself.
