An easy-to-use Yubikey installation tool for Ubuntu (and other Debian Distros)
Yubikey is a portable USB based biometric authentication device developed by Yubico that provides secure login and authentication to a variety of popular services and platforms. It provides intuitive installation processes for some popular platforms such as Windows and Google Account, but installation process for Linux still remains complicated. This project aims to bring easy and convenient installation to Ubuntu, one of the most popular distribution of Debian Linux.
*With Python 3.7, the tool can be executed through dev.py.
*Without Python, the pre-build can be found at dist/dev.
The tool can be built from python to independent packages using
pyinstaller --add-data 'cmd:.' dev.py
or to single file using
pyinstaller -F dev.py
cp cmd ./dist/
Any version of Ubuntu, Python 3.7, Pyinstall. Anaconda Python management platform in preferred.
The current method of installing Yubikey to Ubuntu requires multiple steps involving terminal commands, testing and configuring YubiKey, and finally enabling YubiKey. The whole process will take a long time and several system files will be touched and modified along the way. If configured improperly, system and root privileges may be locked and cannot properly function without system re-imaging.
The aim of this project is to streamline the complex solution in order to make the setup as easy as possible. The tool will backup necessary system configuration files and walk users through the whole installation process. In case of uninstalling YubiKey, the tool will also reverse any changes to the system, and clean up any trace it left.
This project is beneficial to all users willing to add extra security layer to their systems running Ubuntu. The streamlined process will be suitable for installation of YubiKey on large numbers of computers.
There are certainly risks that come with automated system. Luckily, this project requires minimal user and outside input. In fact, one of the goals of this project is to make user input as few as possible. However, the installation process requires two outside software packages, which may be tampered by third party. In addition, the scripts of installation and guiding tool may also be modified by third party.
For people already own Yubikey products, this tool will be free of charge.