When the Google Online Security blog announced earlier this week the general availability of Security Key, everybody at the office was thrilled, as we’ve been waiting for the day for a while. I’ve been using this for a while already, and my hope is for it to be easy enough for my mother and my sister, as well as my friends, to start using it.

While the promise is for a hassle-free second factor authenticator, it turns out it might not be as simple as originally intended, at least on Linux, at least right now.

Let’s start with the hardware, as there are four different options of hardware that you can choose from:

Yubico FIDO U2F which is a simple option only supporting the U2F protocol, no configuration needed;

Plug-up FIDO U2F which is a cheaper alternative for the same features — I have not witnessed whether it is as sturdy as the Yubico one, so I can’t vouch for it;

Yubikey NEO which provides multiple interface, including OTP (not usable together with U2F), OpenPGP and NFC;

Yubikey NEO-n the same as above, without NFC, and in a very tiny form factor designed to be left semi-permanently in a computer or laptop.

I got the NEO, but mostly to be used with LastPass ­– the NFC support allows you to have 2FA on the phone without having to type it back from a computer – and a NEO-n to leave installed on one of my computers. I already had a NEO from work to use as well. The NEO requires configuration, so I’ll get back at it in a moment.

The U2F devices are accessible via hidraw , a driverless access protocol for USB devices, originally intended for devices such as keyboards and mice but also leveraged by UPSes. What happen though is that you need access to the device, that the Linux kernel will make by default accessible only by root, for good reasons.

To make the device accessible to you, the user actually at the keyboard of the computer, you have to use udev rules, and those are, as always, not straightforward. My personal hacky choice is to make all the Yubico devices accessible — the main reason being that I don’t know all of the compatible USB Product IDs, as some of them are not really available to buy but come from instance from developer mode devices that I may or may not end up using.

If you’re using systemd with device ACLs (in Gentoo, that would be sys-apps/systemd with acl USE flag enabled), you can do it with a file as follows:

# /etc/udev/rules.d/90-u2f-securitykey.rules ATTRS{idVendor}=="1050", TAG+="uaccess" ATTRS{idVendor}=="2581", ATTRS{idProduct}=="f1d0", TAG+="uaccess"

If you’re not using systemd or ACLs, you can use the plugdev group and instead do it this way:

# /etc/udev/rules.d/90-u2f-securitykey.rules ATTRS{idVendor}=="1050", GROUP="plugdev", MODE="0660" ATTRS{idVendor}=="2581", ATTRS{idProduct}=="f1d0", GROUP="plugdev", MODE="0660"

-These rules do not include support for the Plug-up because I have no idea what their VID/PID pairs are, I asked Janne who got one so I can amend this later.- Edit: added the rules for the Plug-up device. Cute their use of f1d0 as device id.

Also note that there are properly less hacky solutions to get the ownership of the devices right, but I’ll leave it to the systemd devs to figure out how to include in the default ruleset.

These rules will not only allow your user to access /dev/hidraw0 but also to the /dev/bus/usb/* devices. This is intentional: Chrome (and Chromium, the open-source version works as well) use the U2F devices in two different modes: one is through a built-in extension that works with Google assets, and it accesses the low-level device as /dev/bus/usb/* , the other is through a Chrome extension which uses /dev/hidraw* and is meant to be used by all websites. The latter is the actually standardized specification and how you’re supposed to use it right now. I don’t know if the former workflow is going to be deprecated at some point, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

For those like me who bought the NEO devices, you’ll have to enable the U2F mode — while Yubico provides the linked step-by-step guide, it was not really completely correct for me on Gentoo, but it should be less complicated now: I packaged the app-crypt/yubikey-neo-manager app, which already brings in all the necessary software, including the latest version of app-crypt/ccid required to use the CCID interface on U2F-enabled NEOs. And if you already created the udev rules file as I noted above, it’ll work without you using root privileges. Just remember that if you are interested in the OpenPGP support you’ll need the pcscd service (it should auto-start with both OpenRC and systemd anyway).

I’ll recount separately the issues with packaging the software. In the mean time make sure you keep your accounts safe, and let’s all hope that more sites will start protecting your accounts with U2F — I’ll also write a separate opinion piece on why U2F is important and why it is better than OTP, this is just meant as documentation, howto set up the U2F devices on your Linux systems.