Configure your YubiKey to use challenge-response modeĪ YubiKey has at least 2 “slots” for keys, depending on the model. Once you’ve got the above libraries installed, setup is simple. As I mentioned earlier, the main objective of setting this up was booting without a keyboard, so I installed the tool from source as detailed in its README. I initially installed this from Ubuntu’s repository as well, but the version they’ve got is fairly out of date and required both a YubiKey and passphrase instead of just the YubiKey. yubikey-luks is what lets you use the YubiKey as an authentication method for a LUKS setup.I installed it from the Ubuntu repository and had no problems. yubikey-personalization allows you to change the settings on your YubiKey.Next, there were two packages that I needed to configure everything: I set a passphrase like normal-the process I describe in this post allows access with either this passphrase or the YubiKey. While I waited for my YubiKey to arrive, I installed Ubuntu 20.04 with full-disk encryption (using the default option of LUKS, or Linux Unified Key Setup) on the computer. Preparationįirst off, you need a YubiKey, if you don’t have one already. In this post I’ll show you how you can do the same. This allowed me to avoid the need to type a password without giving up security. I didn’t really want to haul a keyboard and monitor around with me, so I came up with an alternative solution: using a YubiKey as my method of authentication. Because this computer was intended for use with sensitive information/source code, I needed to encrypt the disk, which meant that I’d need to enter a passphrase before I could boot it up. However, there was an immediate issue with this plan. Recently I built a small desktop computer to run applications that were a bit much for my laptop to handle, intending to bring it with me when I work outside my apartment.

Alternative yubikey