Our Historical Origins
1748 / Augustin Ehrensvard designs Sveaborg an innovative fortress to protect Sweden against Russia, and is later ennobled by the Swedish king for this work. The fortress is today listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.
2007 / Yubico is founded
Yubico is founded in Stockholm, Sweden making secure login easy and available to everyone, and enabling one single authentication key to work across any number of services. Jakob Ehrensvard, CTO, electronic computer engineer, with direct lineage to the fortress engineer, and Stina Ehrensvard, CEO & Co-Founder, industrial product designer, develops a working prototype of the YubiKey 1.0, the world’s first one touch, one-time password authenticator, requiring no client or driver as it identifies itself as a keyboard.
2008 / YubiKey 1.0 is launched
On the Security Now podcast, YubiKey 1.0 is launched, two weeks after Stina meets the podcast host Steve Gibson at the top of an escalator at the RSA conference in San Francisco. The listeners of the podcast become Yubico’s first customers and contributors to our open source community.
2009 / Yubico adds “static password”
Yubico adds the new “static password” feature to the YubiKey, including the option of sending a static password, up to 60 characters long, with the YubiKey touch button. YubiKey 2.0 is launched with new innovative, high durability, moulded monoblock design.
2013 / FIDO and Personal Identity Verification
Yubico and Google contribute the U2F technical specifications to the FIDO Alliance, and then join as board members. OpenPGP is added as a feature to the YubiKey. Yubico also adds the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) feature with attestation to the YubiKey NEO.
2014 / First FIDO U2F Reference Design Launch
Google launches support for U2F security keys in Gmail and Chrome. Yubico launches the first FIDO U2F reference design in the form of the “blue” security key, and publishes free open source U2F server code, and technical support to service providers.
