Packaging for the Yubikey NEO, a frustrating adventure

I have already posted a howto on how to set up the YubiKey NEO and YubiKey NEO-n for U2F, and I promised I would write a bit more on the adventure to get the software packaged in Gentoo.

You have to realize at first that my relationship with Yubico has not always being straightforward. I have at least once decided against working on the Yubico set of libraries in Gentoo because I could not get a hold of a device as I wanted to use it. But luckily now I was able to place an order with them (for some two thousands euro) and I have my devices.

But Yubico’s code is usually quite well written, and designed to be packaged much more easily than most other device-specific middleware, so I cannot complain too much. Indeed, they split and release separately different libraries with different goals, so that you don’t need to wait for enough magnitude to be pulled for them to make a new release. They also actively maintain their code in GitHub, and then push proper make dist releases on their website. They are in many ways a packager’s dream company.

But let’s get back to the devices themselves. The NEO and NEO-n come with three different interfaces: OTP (old-style YubiKey, just much longer keys), CCID (Smartcard interface) and U2F. By default the devices are configured as OTP only, which I find a bit strange to be honest. It is also the case that at the moment you cannot enable both U2F and OTP modes, I assume because there is a conflict on how the “touch” interaction behaves, indeed there is a touch-based interaction on the CCID mode that gets entirely disabled once enabling either of U2F or OTP, but the two can’t share.

What is not obvious from the website is that to enable U2F (or CCID) modes, you need to use yubikey-neo-manager, an open-source app that can reconfigure the basics of the Yubico device. So I had to package the app for Gentoo of course, together with its dependencies, which turned out to be two libraries (okay actually three, but the third one sys-auth/ykpers was already packaged in Gentoo — and actually originally committed by me with Brant proxy-maintaining it, the world is small, sometimes). It was not too bad but there were a few things that might be worth noting down.

First of all, I had to deal with dev-libs/hidapi that allows programmatic access to raw HID USB devices: the ebuild failed for me, both because it was not depending on udev, and because it was unable to find the libusb headers — turned out to be caused by bashisms in the configure.ac file, which became obvious as I moved to dash. I have now fixed the ebuild and sent a pull request upstream.

This was the only real hard part at first, since the rest of the ebuilds, for app-crypt/libykneomgr and app-crypt/yubikey-neo-manager were mostly straightforward — only I had to figure out how to install a Python package as I never did so before. It’s actually fun how distutils will error out with a violation of install paths if easy_install tries to bring in a non-installed package such as nose, way before the Portage sandbox triggers.

The problems started when trying to use the programs, doubly so because I don’t keep a copy of the Gentoo tree on the laptop, so I wrote the ebuilds on the headless server and then tried to run them on the actual hardware. First of all, you need to have access to the devices to be able to set them up; the libu2f-host package will install udev rules to allow the plugdev group access to the hidraw devices — but it also needed a pull request to fix them. I also added an alternative version of the rules for systemd users that does not rely on the group but rather uses the ACL support (I was surprised, I essentially suggested the same approach to replace pam_console years ago!)

Unfortunately that only works once the device is already set in U2F mode, which does not work when you’re setting up the NEO for the first time, so I originally set it up using kdesu. I have since decided that the better way is to use the udev rules I posted in my howto post.

After this, I switched off OTP, and enabled U2F and CCID interfaces on the device — and I couldn’t make it stick, the manager would keep telling me that the CCID interface was disabled, even though the USB descriptor properly called it “Yubikey NEO U2F+CCID”. It took me a while to figure out that the problem was in the app-crypt/ccid driver, and indeed the change log for the latest version points out support for specifically the U2F+CCID device.

I have updated the ebuilds afterwards, not only to depend on the right version of the CCID driver – the README for libykneomgr does tell you to install pcsc-lite but not about the CCID driver you need – but also to check for the HIDRAW kernel driver, as otherwise you won’t be able to either configure or use the U2F device for non-Google domains.

Now there is one more part of the story that needs to be told, but in a different post: getting GnuPG to work with the OpenPGP applet on the NEO-n. It was not as straightforward as it could have been and it did lead to disappointment. I’ll be a good post for next week.