Login to Your Mac Using Yubikey

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the Yubikey yet on this blog. It’s an amazing little device that generates an OTP (One Time Password) each time you have it plugged into a computer and touch a little button on the USB key. It’s a great method for authentication as it’s impossible for anyone to brute force attack or crack the password, because it’s never the same.
Also it’s great because you never have to remember the password, or type in an RSA key. Just insert the key into your computer, and touch a button to login.

Revolutionary. Now I want to use it to login to my Macbook Pro running Apple’s Mac OS X. Now logging into the Mac uses PAM the same as regular Linux/UNIX, but the modules I tried to use wouldn’t compile on my system without modify the source code, which I did but did not like the results.

I knew about Rohos and they had just released a Mac version of their product, so I downloaded and installed the trial version. It’s been running on my laptop a few days and here’s a little video showing you how easy it is, and how it works: