Enabling Yubikey U2F support in Linux

If you're using a Yubikey device with a Linux computer, you may have noticed that plugging in the device and pressing the button does emit a string of characters, however it fails to work with U2F websites when using, say, Google Chrome. In order to get it working, you'll want to execute the following command and reboot your computer:

sudo sh -c 'curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Yubico/libu2f-host/master/70-u2f.rules > /etc/udev/rules.d/70-u2f.rules'

This downloads a file which gives your computer special instructions for handling the Yubikey device. Once that's done and you've rebooted, U2F should work just fine.

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.