Case Study: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory achieves organization-wide secure, user-friendly smart card authentication with Yubico YubiKey

PNNL deploys YubiKey smart card authentication organization-wide

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is a U.S. research center focused on energy, environment, and national security, where protecting sensitive systems and data is critical. Historically only a subset of privileged users used smart cards, so PNNL sought to modernize authentication by rolling out strong, user-friendly smart card authentication to all standard user accounts without disrupting daily workflows.

PNNL chose YubiKey and executed a change-management driven rollout—clear messaging, manager templates, user testing, an online scheduling tool, and an identity-proofing process for on- and off-site staff—to deploy two YubiKeys per employee to over 4,500 staff in six months. The result was organization-wide, flexible, high-assurance authentication that was quick to deploy and intuitive for users, improving security posture while maintaining high adoption.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory