Thinking of ways to implant a Yubikey

Since the Yubikey Neo can be programmed over NFC for supporting Universal Second Factor (U2F) I’ve been thinking of ways to implant one for acting as an authenticatior for various services. U2F works on mobile and desktop, and a single device can support many applications.

I’ve got a Neo handy and am going to start testing with some cutlets from a signal perspective, but the biggest task to solve seems to be the best way to encase it and determining the optimal amount of trimming I can do on it.

Any thoughts for the best way to encase a yubikey neo? I’m currently scouting for an xray machine near me to do some imaging to determine how much I can cut away.

Cheers,
~H

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http://www.hexview.com/~scl/neo/

It doesn’t look like there’s anything to trim down. That aside, how are you planning to power it if you implant it?

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It doesn’t need power in NFC mode; it only needs to be plugged in if using USB to provide the second factor rather than NFC

The VivoKey Flex will be able to perform much like an implantable Neo, including OTP and U2F applets.

Oh wow, I’ve only saw the initial splash page for vivokey before (maybe put some links to the other pages on the main page?) I had no idea it was your project.

I saw that you said it was reduced in size now. About the size of the Flex?

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I have a problem mixing product names hah… but basically “the VivoKey” is now known as “VivoKey Flex” which is different from the flexNT and flexDF. A new thinner version of the flexDF should be coming soon.

We are continuing to experiment with the Flex antenna configuration, and now we are exploring updated antenna designs for the flexDF as well. The flexNT antenna design is pretty much set and cannot be improved upon.

When it comes to antenna designs, being narrow is much more important than being short… a longer but more narrow device is still easier to install because it requires less cutting and less suturing than a shorter but wider device. The flexDF is currently 10mm wide and we think we can cut that down to at least 8mm. This may also open up other alternative options for both incision procedure as well as close procedure.