OGoogle releases an open-source 2FA security key platform called OpenSK. The company is deeply involved with security keys and has always worked to improve mobile security. The Titan line of security keys comes with full integration to your Android or iOS smartphone. You can use this to authenticate your login to your Google account. OpenSK is an open-source project that lets the developers build their own 2FA security key.
The team has written OpenSK in Rust and is quite simple to follow. This is because it supports both the FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards. Solo and Somu are other open-source projects for security key platforms. OpenSK follows the legacy of these platforms. By having OpenSK as an open research platform, it is hoped that security key manufacturers, researchers, and other supporters work together to come up with new techniques that could speed up security key adoption.
To keep our digital life private, the minimum requirement we have to adhere to is the two-factor security or authorization. However, there some hardware that doesn’t have these necessary factors, highlighting the lack of security. This is why open source enthusiasts and supporters will be super glad to hear that Google is now working on OpenSK. Google says that it will release soon. It will come with support for both FIDO U2F and FIDO2.
OpenSK
With this release, developers can flash OpenSK on a Nordic chip dongle. This dongle supports all of the major features of FIDO2. This includes Bluetooth Low Energy, USB, NFC, and a dedicated hardware crypto core. Director of Product Management at Nordic Semiconductor, Kjetil Holstad, said, “We’re excited to collaborate with Google and the open-source community on the new OpenSK research platform. We hope that our industry-leading nRF52840’s native support for secure cryptographic acceleration combined with new features and testing here will help the industry gain mainstream adoption of security keys.”
The developers have written the code in Rust and it runs on TockOS for cleaner OS abstractions and better isolation. Rust is known for its strong memory safety which is known to offer protection against logical attacks. On the other hand, TockOS provides a sandboxed architecture that provides better isolation of the security key applet, drivers, and kernel.
Google even gave a quick demonstration of OpenSK working on a Nordic chip dongle as a security key. Google’s OpenSK is just out and is more like an experimental release. It is compatible with and can only work with a single piece of reference hardware at this point – the Nordic chip dongle. However, if this goes on to be a success, Google and its team along with the other developers and security researchers working on this would be able to build something solid using this as the base. This will certainly benefit open-source security and make it better. Do you want to know more about how OpenSK works on TockOS? Simply pop over to the GitHub repository and go over it in detail.
