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My YubiKey always was an easy safe way to log in to various websites, but last week this stopped working: the website asks me to use the security key, Firefox shows a dialog asking to touch the button on the key, but unlike before the button itself does not blink and touching it has no effect.

This happened first on my work laptop, then some days later on my personal one, suggesting it is either some update issue or damage on the key that surfaces differently on different machines. But I actually have two keys, and it's exactly the same issue with both.

Setup (same for personal and work laptop): Ubuntu 22.04, Xfce, Firefox 125 (as default, running through Snap).

The YubiKey is shown as normal in lsusb as

Bus 001 Device 007: ID 1050:0120 Yubico.com Yubikey Touch U2F Security Key

but it is also not recognized by the yubioath-desktop app, which just keeps telling me to insert my YubiKey.

What could be the problem here?

leftaroundabout
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1 Answers1

13

This turned out to be neither the fault of Firefox, Yubico or Linux, but rather Snap which sits between them, specifically version 2.62. The issue is discussed on https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/2062148.

I don't exactly understand the problem, but the upshot is that inserting the key does not make it visible to already running software. Apparently this will be fixed in Snap-2.63.

In the meanwhile, a workaround is to insert the key right after system startup before launching the browser (and leaving it there, which is less then optimal), or installing a browser that does not run behind Snap (e.g. snap remove firefox && sudo apt install firefox†).

†Apparently apt does not do the trick, see comment.
leftaroundabout
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