Case Study: New York Air National Guard achieves phishing‑resistant, high‑assurance network authentication with Yubico

New York Air National Guard is introducing the YubiKey for high-assurance network authentication

The New York Air National Guard faced a rapidly expanding remote-access perimeter as COVID‑era telework, reservists, retirees and contractors increasingly needed secure access to DoD systems but often lacked CAC-enabled government devices. That shift — combined with rising phishing and credential‑theft attacks — made traditional perimeter defenses and username/password logins insufficient for protecting sensitive networks and privileged accounts.

To address this, NYANG is piloting Yubico’s YubiKey, a DoD OCIO‑approved hardware authenticator and CAC alternative that supports FIDO2/WebAuthn and multiple form factors for BYOD use. The program began with senior leaders and is slated to scale to 1,700 users, enabling mail‑delivery of keys, phishing‑resistant logins across NIPRNet/SIPRNet use cases, and easier telework access; expected outcomes include reduced account takeovers (Google reported elimination of such incidents after YubiKey deployment), improved usability for non‑GFE devices, and measurable secure logins as the success metric.

New York Air National Guard

Major Liaquat Ali

Cyber Operations Officer