Yubico Forum

I have a key that I used to store an ugly password. used it for a long time.
Went to use it today and it is not even recognized by the system.
Its the only key I ever used, I pulled another one from the pack I bought years ago and it is recognized fine but doesn't contain the key I need.
Is there any hope for recovery?

I would say yes they can and do die, there are quite a few reasons for a smart card to stop working. But recovering something from a card that no longer works at all is probably not within the realm of things that are easy to do for obvious reasons.

My oldest pre-lockdown NEO with 3.1.2 firmware still works, but I do have an old Aladdin etoken pro 72k that simply doesn't show up anymore as a USB device. It was a pain to use anyway compared to these neo's so I just tossed it aside and moved on.

There are definitely general component failures possible like anything else, from static electricity, shorting something, or just a manufacturers defect.

And Javacard applets running on cards like the neo do use non-volatile memory for certain structures in the programming language, things that would normally just use RAM on another platform (Javacard applets have to deal with cards being suddenly removed in the middle of an operation etc). I would bet (blindly, I haven't checked on this) that simply using the card could wear out that memory, but I don't know how fast or whether it even matters during the expected lifetime of a card.

There are also security features that might cause a card to stop working or appear to, perhaps tripped accidentally under certain circumstances, but I would think most cards would simply show an "end of life" or tamper indication rather than just die in those situations.

Most secure elements used in smart cards are quoted with a minimum useful lifetime of 10 years when stored at a specific temperature. This timeframe doesn't account for EEPROM wear-and-tear, which could reduce the useful lifetime significantly.

It will probably last longer, but no one seems to be able to say how much longer. The sad fact is that EEPROM technology is not designed for long-term data storage. Once the firmware on the chip becomes unreadable, the key will be bricked. Technically the EEPROM is still good, it just forgets what is stored on it (which happens to be critical information).

This is not a problem that is specific to Yubikeys: pretty much every electronic device you own that has microcontrollers with firmware stored in some form of EEPROM will eventually become unusable in a matter of decades, even of all of the other components remain in good operating condition.