Petition App Proof of Concept Uses YubiKeys for Signatory Authentication

Among the many interesting developments that arose from last week’s DeveloperWeek 2018 expo and conference was a new integration of support for Yubico’s YubiKey two-factor authentication devices.

As Yubico Ecosystem Senior Director Alex Yabukov explains in a new post on the company’s blog, the integration is the product of a competition issued by Yubico as part of DevWeek’s hackathon event. The winner, PetitionThat, is a proof of concept app designed to collect and authenticate signatures for digital petitions, and to allow petition organizers to continue their outreach via phone, text, and email. Yubico’s USB and contactless authentication keys evidently fit the bill for the app’s developers, who told Yubico, “When we saw the tools and technologies that were being promoted for the hackathon and how well they could service our idea, we knew that this was finally the time to build it.”

Now, while there are other online petition platforms available, with its YubiKey support, PetitionThat features a baked-in authentication system that helps to ensure that petition organizers and supporters alike can’t game the system, which in turn helps to ensure trust in petitions’ success.

While the exercise thus helps to demonstrate the value of the YubiKey solution, it also attests to the simplicity of implementing it. Describing their experience for Yubico’s blog, PetitionThat’s developers assert that while Yubico says YubiKey integration takes less than an hour, for them it took only 15 minutes. “There were some APIs from other hackathon sponsors that were so complicated or poorly documented that we had to re-architect our service to avoid using them,” they said, adding, “The YubiKey and YubiCloud just integrated seamlessly.”

Source: Yubico Ecosystem Blog