In this day and age of cybercrime and hackers constantly finding new and sophisticated ways to steal data, it's especially important to keep our systems secure . With that in mind , Google has announced an open source project for hardware security keys for USB drives . The project is called OpenSK and is an open source implementation written in Rust to support the FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards.
FIDO (Fast Identity Online) authentication standards were created to provide greater security than passwords. FIDO protocols implement standard public key encryption for end-to-end authentication. All personal information is stored locally on the user's device.
So far, only Google and Yubikey have offered FIDO-compliant keys, using their own hardware and software.
The new open source project, OpenSK, will allow users to create their own key by flashing the OpenSK firmware to a USB dongle. OpenSK is supported not only by USB drives, but by all dongles that support major transport protocols, such as NFC, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and a dedicated cryptographic core.
To create your own FIDO authenticator, you can follow the instructions given in the video below.
As the company announced in a blog post, “this release should be considered an experimental research project to be used for testing and research purposes.”.
Google says the goal behind the OpenSK project is to involve more researchers, security , and other interested people to develop security keys and increase adoption of FIDO standards.
