This isn’t strictly a privacy question as a security one, so I’m asking this in the context of individuals, not organizations.

I currently use OTP 2FA everywhere I can, though some services I use support hardware security keys like the Yubikey. Getting a hardware key may be slightly more convenient since I wouldn’t need to type anything in but could just press a button, but there’s added risk with losing the key (I can easily backup OTP configs).

Do any of you use hardware security keys? If so, do you have a good argument in favor or against specific keys? (e.g. Yubikey, Nitrokey, etc)

  • @[email protected]English
    9•9 months ago

    I have not used hardware keys, but if I were going to, I would want one that is open source hardware and software like the solo key.

    • haui
      1•9 months ago

      Thanks for the heads up! Great suggestion!

      • @[email protected]English
        2•9 months ago

        No problem. I was looking into it at one point, but didn’t ultimately end up going through with it. Because of my password manager and OTP.

        • haui
          1•9 months ago

          Can relate. I‘m getting a bit fussy bc of the otp being on my phone and backup keys being spotty and stored indiscriminately atm. Any idea how to solve that without embracing the lock out scenario (storing the keys in a vault locked by one of the keys)?

          • @[email protected]English
            1•9 months ago

            I just have my OTP secrets within my password manager. I know I know bad me, but in my defense my password manager is local only and is not stored in the cloud at all. My master password is also quite a long passphrase with special characters in it.

            • haui
              2•9 months ago

              Okay, thanks for elaborating. My vault is also on my home network only with an insanely long password.

              But since someone tried breaking into my network recently I felt like I might need to harden up a bit.

              In a professional environment I would obviously be much more paranoid but my home server is for tinkering so I dont expect perfection.

              I would like a better setup for the vault and otp though. Like, if I store the admin otp key in the vault, I would be unable to retrieve it and get admin access which is bad. Theoretically, I could just store it in an encrypted file with the password stored in the vault.

              But I‘m not sure if that is best practice. With my backups I try my best for 3-2-1 backups procedure so I‘d love to make it easy and reproducible for myself.

              Long text, sorry. Thanks for reading.