Yubico Forum

Hi there,

Can I change the public part (static Yubikey ID) of the full OTP string to something more meaningful (and possibly shorter) without breaking the authentication with the Yubico server?

I'm fairly techie but the documentation is pretty bewildering to be honest. It would be helpful to understand some typical usage scenarios. You seem to be able to change various settings via the personalisation tool, but it's not at all clear why it would be useful to do that. In the absence of this information, I'm nervous about changing anything in case I break the synchronisation with the server...

Thanks,

Glen.

P.S. When I search for "yubikey id" on these forums, the search engine ignores the "id" term (it actually says "ignoring id") which renders it a fairly generic search... why...?

Please note that, the Public ID aka YubiKey ID (which is the first 12 static characters of the OTP) is used by the OTP validation server to extract the AES Key associated with that YubiKey. The Yubico OTP validation server requires it to be 12 characters and in modhex format in order to correctly extract the AES Key. If you change the Public ID to any shorter length, the Yubico OTP validation server won't be able to extract the AES Key and the OTP validation will fail.

If you want the YubiKey ID to be shorter, you need to modify the Yubico OTP validation server accordingly and need to host your own OTP validation server.

We hope this helps!