The 5Ci is, however, thicker than the YubiKey 5 NFC. It's cast in durable, black plastic with a metal-reinforced center hole to attach it to your key ring. That's a little over one-half the width of a USB-A key, and slightly shorter. At $70, the YubiKey 5Ci is the most expensive key in the family.Ĭompared to the USB-A YubiKey design, the 5Ci is tiny. The 5 Nano and 5C Nano cost $50 and $60 respectively, and are designed to live inside your ports semi-permanently. The USB-C YubiKey 5C costs $50, and most closely resembles the 5Ci in its thin, stubby design. Starting from the left, the USB-A YubiKey 5 NFC costs $45, and is perhaps the most capable of all the devices. The YubiKey 5 series, pictured above, covers several devices. The USB-A Yubico Security Key supports only FIDO2/WebAuthn and costs $20, while the USB-A Security Key NFC adds wireless support for $27.

The YubiKey family has grown significantly, featuring seven different keys in sundry sizes and a preponderance of plugs and protocols. Microsoft, for instance, has been experimenting with using WebAuthn devices like YubiKeys for completely passwordless authentication. The W3C certified WebAuthn standard has brought this style of authentication to more and more browsers and services in recent years, and could be the future of how we do authentication. Yubico has spearheaded the creation of the FIDO2 protocol and the WebAuthn standard, which uses public key cryptography for secure authentication. Receiving one-time password via SMS is probably the one people are most familiar with, although this is on its way out due to security concerns.

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