When the internet was designed, it was done for sharing knowledge and resources among the world, no one had thought that security will become such a big challenge. As more and more sophisticated services move online, so do fraudsters.

Compromised identities have reached a level where the weaknesses in usernames and passwords as well as traditional software security solutions have been exposed. There is a growing demand for strong two-factor authentication, but the more secure hardware devices are too complicated to use in general and expensive to scale for the majority of users and services. Then in 2007, Yubico came up with a prototype of YubiKey with a mission to make the internet secure.