In early 2016, a major enterprise (that at the time was not yet a Yubico customer) asked us two great questions. Why does Yubico exist? And how come 9 of the top 10 internet companies trust a company with less than 100 employees? In this, our first blog of the year, we will share the answers to these questions.
Yubico was founded with the mission to make secure login easy and available for everyone. And our vision was to enable a single key to access any number of services. To make that happen, we decided to work in close collaboration with the internet giants on the assumption that, by carefully listening to their requirements, our technology would have the opportunity to reach all computing devices, platforms, and services.
We won the trust of the world’s leading internet brands, not by selling to them, but by offering our top innovation capabilities and focusing on open standards. To simplify the use of OATH one-time passwords, we removed the need to retype codes from one device to another. For systems requiring a long and complicated static password, we created a way to generate the code in a simple touch. To prevent trojans from hacking a PIV smart card device, we added user presence, touch-to-sign, and device attestation. And to take strong public key crypto to all internet users, we invented the concept of an authenticator that can work with any number of services, with no shared secrets — which is the core innovation and foundation behind FIDO standards.
We won the trust of the internet giants with exactly the right team, and size to be agile, innovative, and humble. During 2017, billions of people will be safer online because of our past and future contributions to open standards. And that is also the answer to why Yubico exists.
To quote American anthropologist and author Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
