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YubiKeys are vulnerable to cloning attacks thanks to newly discovered side channel
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Technology
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It feels like this vulnerability isn't notable for the majority of users who don't typically include "Being compromised by a Nation-State-Level Actor."
That being said; I do hope they get it fixed; and it looks like there's already mitigations in place like protecting the authentication by another factor such as a PIN. That helps; for people who do have the rare threat model issue in play.
The complexity of the attack also seems clearly difficult to achieve in any time frame; and would require likely hundreds of man-hours of work to pull off.
If we assume they're funded enough to park a van of specialty equipment close enough to you; steal your key and clone it; then return it before you notice...nothing you can do can defend against them.
One thing the article doesn’t make very clear is that for 2FA the PIN requirement comes from the site itself. If the site requires User Verification, the PIN is required. If not, it is not prompted even if set and this attack is possible. The response to the site just says they knew it.
It is different for Passkeys. They are stored on the device and physically locked behind the PIN, but this is just an attack on 2FA where the username and password are known. (In depth it’s more than that, but for most people walking around with a Yubikey…)
It also seems limited in scope to the targeted site and not that everything else protected by that specific Yubikey. That limits how useful this is in general, which is another reason it is sort of nation-state level or an extremely targeted attack. It’s not something your local law enforcement are going to use.
I think the YubiHSM is a much more appealing target, but that isn’t so much a consumer device and has its own authentication methods.