01/09/2019

A YubiKey For iOS Will Soon Free Your iPhone From Passwords

Yubico has received MFi certification, making it an official Apple hardware partner

Over the last several years, Yubico has become close to ubiquitous in the field of hardware authentication. Its YubiKey token can act as a second layer of security for your online accounts and can even let you skip out on using passwords altogether. The only problem? It’s been largely unusable on the iPhone. That’s going to change soon.

The upshot: Yubico has received MFi certification, meaning Apple will officially support it as a hardware partner. To that end, the company will finally be able to make a YubiKey that fits into the iPhone and iPad’s proprietary Lightning port, giving those devices the seamless security that already works so well on PCs. On the opposite side, it will offer a USB-C connector for MacBooks.

The news comes with some caveats. Yubico won’t have an actual product until later this year and needs developer buy-in for its Lightning token to reach its full potential. “It’s iPhone; it’s restrictive,” says Jerrod Chong, senior vice president of product at Yubico. “We’re not exactly there with default settings on an iPhone yet, so there’s some work that developers need to do to enable their apps to work with the Lightning key.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.