In this homelab series video I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with a YubiKey and SSH, and honestly… it’s kind of cool. I had a couple YubiKeys sitting around from years ago and figured I didn’t need them because my phone handles most of my 2FA. But after talking with some friends, I realized I could use a security key for SSH authentication so the login is tied to physically touching the key. That’s a really nice upgrade over the usual “password-based logins” situation. I walk through generating an SSH keypair using the security-key type (the “-sk” part), then grabbing the public key and dropping it into authorized_keys on the server side. One big gotcha: both the client and server need a modern OpenSSH version (at least 8.2) because that’s when FIDO/security key support shows up. In my case, some of my Oracle Linux 8 boxes were stuck on older packages, so I just spun up a CentOS Stream 9 container to make life easier. Once it’s in place, SSH prompts for “confirm user presence,” and you literally touch the YubiKey button to complete the login. The takeaway is simple: you can keep your SSH workflow, but add a physical proof step that makes unauthorized access way harder.