Setup FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) testing environment in 2 minutes

This is a quick start guide of setting up a node.js testing environment for U2F.  For details, please refer to the github page of u2f-sample-server.

What is u2f-sample-server?

It is a ready-to-use node.js package to test U2F tokens.  It is a demo to show how to register a U2F device and later authenticate it.  Messages exchanged between the server (relying party), the browser (client), and the U2F devices are shown.

To allow the use of the built-in U2F plugin of Chrome browser, the package contains self-signed certificate for SSL connection.

Note that although u2f-sample-server demonstrates the full register and authenticate workflow, it is not the proper way to do it in real-life application.  For example, the registered U2F devices should be associated with particular account and stored in database rather than session.

Steps

• Make sure you have node.js environment setup properly on your machine
• Clone the u2f-sample-server from github:

git clone https://github.com/kitsook/u2f-sample-server

• Install dependencies

cd u2f-sample-server
npm install

• Start the server

node index.js

• In your Chrome / Chromium browser, navigate to https://localhost:4430/demo and start testing the U2F registration and authentication workflow. 

As of May 2016, there is bug in the node-u2flib-server module. If you encountered the following error when starting the server, you will need to comment out one line of code.  Please refer to the github page for details.

module.js:328

    throw err;

    ^

Error: Cannot find module './crypto/random_challenge_generator.js'

    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:326:15)

    at Function.Module._load (module.js:277:25)

    at Module.require (module.js:354:17)

    at require (internal/module.js:12:17)

......