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I have a YubiKey from Yubico which I would like to use in order to secure my online accounts.

When trying it with Google, it tells me that Safari does not support it, I have to use Chrome instead. Is there a way I can use it with Google when I use the Safari browser?

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  • Have you set up two factor authentication with Google services?
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Dec 29, 2016 at 14:02
  • Are you looking for official vendor support from yubikey to say they either have made and released or have not made and released a Safari plug in? (Or perhaps are you looking for a go-between like LastPass which would bridge the two?)
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Dec 29, 2016 at 14:03
  • @IconDaemon I have two factor authentication set up using Google Authentorcator, however I would like to use my Yubico Key as well.
    – iProgram
    Commented Dec 29, 2016 at 14:52
  • @bmike I would like any 'secure' method which would allow me to use it with Google in Safari.
    – iProgram
    Commented Dec 29, 2016 at 14:53

3 Answers 3

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First, I assume you are using YubiKey 4 with U2F support.

Safari does not support U2F natively, but if you have Safari 10, you can add the plugin Safari-FIDO-U2F available from blahgeek on GitHub.

The author confirms that the plugin works with some of the websites (with some hacking required to show up to the server as Chrome):

  • Github Account Two-factor authentication
  • Dropbox Account Security
  • Fastmail

but also warns it does not work with Google Account (although it does with Google's demo site).

So for now the answer is you cannot use U2F to login to Google, but it might change in future.

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    Chiming in to note that the WebKit team has decided not to officially support U2F, because they consider it a Chrome-only hack, rather than a standardized API. See this and previous messages. They're working on the Web Authentication API instead.
    – Ricardo Sanchez-Saez
    Commented Oct 2, 2017 at 17:03
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Safari is working on support for these keys–it is currently supported as an Experimental Feature in Safari 12.1 and available in Safari Technology Preview.

Update on May 31st, 2019: The latest Safari Technology Preview enables this by default, no longer making it an Experimental Feature. The next major Safari release should support this.

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Safari 13, released on 2019-09-20, now supports FIDO2 USB security keys on macOS.

From the Release Notes:

Added support for FIDO2-compliant USB security keys with the Web Authentication standard in Safari on macOS.

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  • Google still insists that you use Chrome to log into a Google Account. Gotta love that strategy tax.
    – Frank Schmitt
    Commented Sep 25, 2019 at 22:57
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    @FrankSchmitt I came here to agree with you then tried adding a key with Brave, and then going to Safari Incognito, where it asked me to use my security key to authenticate. It just showed a prompt in the page and nothing from the browser to make me think it was doing a FIDO thing. Then I pressed my Yukikey button and it worked! Login succeeded.
    – Kyle Hotchkiss
    Commented Nov 7, 2019 at 11:09

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