giving us that warm feeling of confidence in security? Is even buying 'direct from Yubico' and assuming your package didn't get switched with another one during transit by some contractor riding in a big brown truck working for a three letter agency or the local authorities or the equivalent of some GeekSquad employee who gets paid $500 every time he substitutes a 'special' key. If security is what someone is really concerned about, is buying a gadget filled with binary by someone at a hacker conference with a chip made in China and there is no way in the world that anyone can really really know exactly what a USB device actually does in the moment it is plugged in.

How to Check (and Erase) Everything Google Knows About You.

How to Create and Remember Super-Secure Passwords.

If you're technically-minded, go to GitHub for his instructions on how to make your own 2FA USB keys. We'll spare you the technical details, which you can read on Patrick's blog.

Patrick located cheap USB printed circuit boards and central processing chips in China, and wrote much of the software himself. Patrick's token key uses the Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard, an open standard developed by Google and Yubico and now managed by the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance, a consortium of companies that includes American Express, Intel, Lenovo and PayPal among its members. So Yubico and other makers of 2FA USB keys hope their devices catch on, and Patrick showed that these indispensable security devices can be produced cheaply and fairly easily.

(It's too easy to spoof or to intercept a text message.) Boom! The new computer is verified.ĢFA keys may come into greater use soon, as the National Institute for Standards and Technology in July 2016 warned against using text-message-based two-factor authentication.

Instead of waiting for a numeric code to be texted to your phone when you log into Google or Dropbox from a new computer, you simply plug the key into a USB port on your computer. 2FA keys are yet another way to implement two-factor authentication.

Usb fido key