Yubico, a leading provider of easy and secure login solutions, expands the use of its YubiKey with its first disk encryption solution thanks to a global open source community.

The proof of concept for using the YubiKey to encrypt the entire hard drive on a Linux computer has been developed by Tollef Fog Heen, a long time YubiKey user and Debian package maintainer.

“Implementing the challenge-response encryption was surprisingly easy by building on the open source tools from Yubico as well as the existing full disk encryption solution from Debian,” says Tollef Fog Heen, Debian package maintainer. “Using a YubiKey and challenge-response based solution means an attacker has to work much harder to steal your data than if you were using just a static password because your password changes with each boot.”

Since its launch in 2008, Yubico's open source community has grown to a global community with thousands of members, contributing reference codes for easy integrations of YubiKeys into any IT system. Leading open source projects supporting YubiKey include Fedora, WordPress, Wikimedia, osCommerce, SAML, etc.

» More about the Linux Disk encryption project