Yubikey

This article describes how Yubico's YubiKey works and how you can use it.

To access the yubikey as user, no custom udev rules should be necessary, as udev gained native support to handle FIDO security tokens.

To use the smart card mode (CCID) of Yubikey, you will also need the PCSC-Lite daemon:

services.pcscd.enable = true;

In order to manage OTP keys you can install the yubioath-desktop package in your profile. This application will also require both the udev rules as well as pcscd enabled.

Yubikey for SSH and GPG authentication

Based on a guide by @drduh, the following should be sufficient for a yubikey usable for ssh:

services.pcscd.enable = true;
services.udev.packages = [ pkgs.yubikey-personalization ];


environment.shellInit = ''
  export GPG_TTY="$(tty)"
  gpg-connect-agent /bye
  export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="/run/user/$UID/gnupg/S.gpg-agent.ssh"
'';

programs = {
  ssh.startAgent = false;
  gnupg.agent = {
    enable = true;
    enableSSHSupport = true;
  };
};

If you do not have a graphical user interface installed make sure to set

programs.gnupg.agent.pinentryFlavor = "curses";

otherwise the pinentry program will not be properly set up and GnuPG cannot ask for the pin of your Yubikey as a result.

Alternatively, SSH_AUTH_SOCK can be set more generally as

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$(gpgconf --list-dirs agent-ssh-socket)

if the right version of gpgconf is available . Note that this might not work on all systems.

Offline key generation

It is best practice to create the keys on a system without network connection to avoid leakages. This guide explains in depth the steps needed for that. There is also a nix expression that creates a nixos live image with all necessary dependencies pre-installed. The image can be created with the nixos-generator tool and depending on the image copied onto a usb stick or executed directly using kexec

Multiple Keys

If you want to use GPG with multiple keys, containing the same subkeys, you have to do this routine when swapping the key

1. killall gpg-agent
2. rm -r ~/.gnupg/private-keys-v1.d/
3. Plug in the new YubiKey
4. gpg --card-status (optional, to see if key is visibile)

Yubikey for Login

Add the following to your configuration.nix to enable challenge-response based Logins

security.pam.yubico = {                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
   enable = true;                                                                                                      
   debug = true;                                                                                                       
   mode = "challenge-response";                                                                                        
 };

You need to program the Yubikey for Challenge-Response on slot 2 and setup the current user for logon

1. nix-shell -p yubico-pam -p yubikey-personalization
2. ykpersonalize -2 -ochal-resp -ochal-hmac -ohmac-lt64 -oserial-api-visible
3. ykpamcfg -2 -v

You should now be able to use your Yubikey to login and for sudo. You can also set security.pam.yubico.control to "required" in order to have multi-factor authentication.

See also https://developers.yubico.com/yubico-pam/Authentication_Using_Challenge-Response.html

Links

• Yubikey_based_Full_Disk_Encryption_(FDE)_on_NixOS