We've spent some time drilling into this issue and the following findings have been noticed:
1. Attaching an original Apple USB keyboard works straight away without any identification dialog.
2. A "Microsoft Comfort Keyboard", which claims to be "MacOS X compatible" brings up the identification dialog, just like with the Yubikey
3. A noname $10 "China" USB keyboard without any claims whatsoever causes exactly the same to happen
4. Spoofing the Yubikey's USB Vendor ID (VID) to 0x5ac (Apple Computer, Inc) and the USB Product ID (PID) to 0x221 (Apple USB MB110S/A keyboard) takes the question away. Most likely, Apple won't like if we spoof their IDs, but we just did it for the sake of testing
5. A non-Apple keyboard make the key "Change Keyboard Type..." button to appear under the System Profiler.
6. Spoofing the VID to be 0x5ac (Apple inc) of the device makes the button to disappear.
7. Analyzing the USB traffic from enummeration and onwards does not reveal anything specific for Apple keyboard vs. the non-Apple one.
These findings leads into the conclusion that the Mac seems to accept Apple keyboards based on the Apple VID only. All other VIDs requires you to identify your keyboard by pressing the key right to the left shift. Spoofing with Apple's VID and different random PIDs seems to be accepted as well.
This distills into our recommendation:
- When the Yubikey is inserted for the first time, the OS will ask you to identify your USB keyboard. This occurs for non-Apple proprietary USB keyboards.
- The dialog says "Your keyboard cannot be identified and will not be usable until it is identified. To identify this keyboard click Continue"
- Just kill the dialog and the Yubikey works straight away.
- Alternatively, press Continue and when the "Identifying your keyboard" dialog appears, press the Yubikey key. A message says that the keyboard cannot be identified. Ignore this and just fill in the keyboard type. Select ANSI and it all works fine.
- This question just appears once. The OS seems to remember your settings even if the dialog is clicked away.
A slight annoyance, I agreee. But hopefully something we can live with.
Any input in this issue is of course accepted
Regards,
JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico
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