Yubico Forum

Posting on behalf of Paul Cooper:

How I can get the Personalisation Tool to see my Yubikey from within an XP VM running in VMware Fusion on a Mac? It does not recognize the key as a USB device. I also have Parallels on my Mac and have no problem seeing the key within an XP VM in that environment.

Hi, just got my upgraded 1.3.3 key today and same problem here, works fine on the mac but not on XP through VMWare.
To be really accurate, the key is configured for static password and it spits the password just fine even on XP through VMWare, problem is that it is not recognized properly as a USB device so the personalization tool doesn't see it.
I really thought 1.3.3 would solve my pre boot authentification problem without compromising other features I used on 1.3.1.

I guess this is bad luck, friday the 13th is still 2 days ahead though ?!

I have no own experience with VMWare, but I guess there must be quite some fiddling going on under the hood with regards to USB devices. Do anyone happen to know how it can maintain the state of USB devices between different VMs ?

Just ventilating a thought - I might be completely lost, but - does VMWare keep track of the USB device addresses or are all USB devices reset and re-enumerated when switcing between different VMs ? If not, does VMWare share the USB devices between all VMs running in the machine and tries to politely keep them active without issuing a bus reset ? If the Yubikey is enumerated by the BIOS and for some reason fails to see the bus reset (that must/should) appear when VMWare starts, then we could run into trouble.

I'll need to drill into it and I guess there is no other way around it than setting up a machine with the real thing and monitor what's happening on the USB bus.

Just repeating the fundamentals:

- Everything ok on 1.3.2 but not on 1.3.3 ?
- Works from Mac apps in Fusion but not from XP apps ?
- Is there some way to fire up the XP Device Manager (when within Fusion) and see if the Yubikey appears as 'unknown device' or if it is simply not there at all ?
- No error codes, no 'The USB device does not function properly' kind of pop-up ?

Any additonal input is appreciated - I'll try to set up a machine within the coming days and see what's going on.

Regards,

JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico

Sorry - I apparently missed a potential important data point here:

Does the Yubikey emit characters within the XP VM or not ? Is it just the config tool that is the problem ?

Regards,

JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico

Another potential datapoint - I just Googled "vmware fusion keyboard" and it appears that there are quite a few threads regarding unresponsive keyboards.

Not that I'm trying to escape the problem but rather to understand if there is some potential incompatibility thing that triggers this issue. Anyone who experiences problems that can take a few minutes looking through these links and see if it provides some information ?

Regards,

JakobE
Hardware- and firmware guy @ Yubico

Hi Jakob,

Well, the 1.3.1 key works flawlessly within VMWare. It is 100% recognized and I am quite used to fiddling with USB devices using VMWare so no worry about that.
The 1.3.3 works (it sends keys in any text file I want) but it is not recognized by Windows as it does not appear in the hardware listings anywhere. I think this is why the personalization tool does not "see" it.

Hi,

First off, I don't have a 1.3.3 key (My keys are in the 1.2 line). I am, however, running OS X. I've been poking around a fair bit with personalization, and did successfully use VMWare Fusion to program my key.

Now, while I don't have a solution for your direct problem, I have been working on making a personalization backend for OS X (10.5.5). I have successfully managed to program my key natively in OS X, and have submitted a patch to the personalization project.

Hopefully, my patch will be put into the code allowing others (such as yourself) to personalize without the need of VMWare.

Oh, the tool is command-line and I've been toying with the idea of making a GUI frontend for it but my time has been on the limited side lately. So the use of the tool is a bit less straightforward than with the windows app.

Just thought I'd mention this since it's tangentially relevant to your issue. Although I don't know the exact status of how all features are implemented in the personalization project, it shouldn't be too hard to extend it to make things work properly for new features in the later firmwares.

Is your code based on the libusb 'official' code from yubico? I would be willing to put together a GUI if you can let me have a copy. Maybe we can start a project on Google code or somewhere for a Mac personilization tool.

Yes, my code is intended for that project. What I did was create an OS X native backend for the same code and use that rather than libusb.

Initially, I did get the libusb version to run, but to get that to work I had to break one of the "rules" of the libusb library. So I ended up making a native backend that plays nice with the OS (requiring 10.5.5, ie. Leopard).

I will look into the most recent changes of the library and make sure my code still runs on it as soon as time permits. As for sharing, I am still hoping that Yubico will integrate my code into the official project since I am not too keen on maintaining a proper fork. If the integration ends up being difficult for whatever reason, I'm sure we can figure something out.

A Google code project for a Mac GUI tool would be great.

Hi All,

I am experiencing the exact same problem as DarskyZ. My 1.3.2 key works fine on Mac OS X 10.5.6 running VMWare (both keyboard and personalization work) but with my 1.3.3 key only the keyboard works (ie. personalization does not work). VMWare not see the 1.3.3 version as a USB device that can be connected.

Is there any workaround/fix that people know about?

Cheers
Lucien