At $70, the YubiKey 5Ci is the most expensive key in the family.Ĭompared to the USB-A YubiKey design, the 5Ci is tiny. The 5 Nano and 5C Nano cost $50 and $60 respectively, and are designed to live inside your ports semi-permanently.

The USB-C YubiKey 5C costs $50, and most closely resembles the 5Ci in its thin, stubby design. Starting from the left, the USB-A YubiKey 5 NFC costs $45, and is perhaps the most capable of all the devices. The YubiKey 5 series, pictured above, covers several devices. So much so that after Google required the use of 2FA hardware keys internally, successful phishing attacks dropped to zero. It's an enormously effective way to secure logins. 2FA is where you use two authenticators from the list instead of just one, since an attacker is unlikely to have two of the three. Something you have could be a hardware authenticator, such as a YubiKey. Something you are is like biometric data, such as using your fingerprint to unlock a phone. Something you know is like a password, which humans are terrible at and we should really let password managers take care of. Instead, it refers to a theory of authentication where you prove that you should have access with: Something you know, something you are, or something you have. In practice, two-factor authentication (2FA) is using two things to log in to a site or service, but that's not where the name comes from. This hydra of a hardware key works exactly as it should and comes packed with features the competition can't match, but is hampered by limited support on iOS and a comparatively high price. This tiny double-ended device sports a USB-C connector on one end and an Apple-compliant Lightning connector on the other. The final frontier for Yubico has been the iPhone, which it finally addresses with the YubiKey 5Ci.

Yubico's YubiKey line has been a go-to choice for simple, hardware two-factor authentication for years.

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