The currently most common version of our Security Key is a tiny dongle that plugs into a computer’s USB port, although the Security Key’s underlying protocols are standardized and can also be used via NFC (contactless) and Bluetooth Low Energy. Our system design goals required Security Keys to be easy to use easy for developers to integrate with a website via simple APIs non-trackability to ensure privacy and protect users from password reuse, phishing, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The goal for Security Keys is stronger security, high user satisfaction, and lower support costs. The full results of our two-year research study are available in our paper Security Keys: Practical Cryptographic Second Factors for the Modern Web here’s a synopsis: What We Set Out To Do During this time, we also integrated support for Security Keys in Google’s Chrome browser and consumer-facing web applications. Our two-year deployment and its analysis provide clear confirmation of how well FIDO’s approach is suited to making strong authentication more usable. Security Keys are devices that make 2-Step Verification for our users easier, and more secure. This is particularly true when the security and privacy of more than billion users are stake, so we applied this philosophy to verify the practical benefits of deploying FIDO-based Security Keys to our more than 50,000 employees.

This addition to our case study series is a contributed post from Google, summarizing a recent paper and study by Google’s Juan Lang, Alexei Czeskis, Dirk Balfanz, Marius Schilder, Christiaan Brand, and Sampath Srinivas.Īt Google, we prefer to make data-driven decisions based on statistical and empirical verification.

Google security key