Yubico Forum

Q: How does the YubiKey button work?

A: Touch gently and cover the light ring for one second. See the light ring go off, then release your finger. You will see the one-time password generated shown on your PC screen. Do not press hard on the Yubikey button.

OK, thanks, now we understand how to use it but could you describe a bit more the technology under that button.
What type of sensor is use, etc...

Thanks
Patgadget
Montreal

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Patgadget
Montreal

It is a solid-state switch with no moving parts to allow the device to be overmolded later on. Today we fill it with epoxy resin so having a mechanical / tacktile switch would have been complicated.

It works by the means of capacitance change as the finger changes the stray capacitance to ground. A software filter translates that into a threshold and we've made it intentionally slow to sort out unintentional triggers.

As you may have noticed, that means that it won't work if you prod it with a pen or if you have gloves on.

Are everyone happy with the sensitivity as it is ? Any comments ? I've tried different settings and selected the current sensitivity by my own preference. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Regards,

Jakob E
Hardware and firmware guy @ Yubico

I like the sensitivity as it is atm. And since the stick is quite loosly in the usb slot a button would be of no good usage (no to speak of water proofness).
I also like how quick the key is recognized (at least at/in my Macbook).

I suspect the time cannot be configured.

I would have liked it a bit faster to trigger as we might use it but with re-authentication for sensitive actions, but I understand that this is not a concern for most of your users.

The sensitivity and response time is fixed and set in firmware. We had some early thoughts of making this configurable, but concluded that it might just cause confusion if the sensitivity was different for different individual devices.

Again - we're very open to feedback in this matter. Getting the right "feeling" is important and we know that some users have thought their keys were faulty as it did not respond in a snap. As threre is no tactical- or audible feedback, we beleive it should be reasonably slow to prevent accidental triggers when the key is removed or inserted.


Regards,

JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico

The timing is fine but yeah at the beginning i thought it was not working.
after reading i understood the delay. good work.

Soto

I would absolutely love if the sensitivity were configurable. Would this help with a laptop that tends to want to read below -30 (whatever that means) in touch tracking, which is apparently not enough to trigger the typing event? I don't believe it has anything to do with worn down contacts in my USB ports. I think the power saving features of my laptops are the culprit. Unfortunately, on my Aspire One, I have no BIOS controllable ability to fix such a thing, if it were the problem. This is true for all my laptops, in fact. <sigh> My experience thus far is that the sensitivity needs to be greater from the factory, or configurable. I would prefer it to be configurable.

Anyone experiencing problems with the sensitivity of the Yubikey button - please let me know and tell about your experiences. E-mail to jakob at yubico dot com.

Regards,

JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico

Configurable would be great - I find the config 1 touch fine, but sometimes find myself not holding my finger on the button long enough for config 2, I would prefer the timing for config 2 a slight bit shorter.