A user-chosen PIN and a tamper-proof smart card protect the Nitrokey in case of loss and theft.

[3][4] In 2008 Jan Suhr, Rudolf Böddeker, and another friend were travelling and found themselves looking to use encrypted emails in internet cafés, which meant the secret keys had to remain secure against computer viruses.

[6] It was a spare-time project of the founders to develop a hardware solution to enable the secure usage of email encryption.

For accounts that accept Nitrokey credentials, a user-chosen PIN can be used to protect these against unauthorized access in case of loss or theft.

In 2011 RSA was hacked and secret keys of securID tokens were stolen which allowed hackers to circumvent their authentication.

[18] As revealed in 2010, many FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certified USB storage devices from various manufacturers could easily be cracked by using a default password.

Nitrokey's mission is to provide the best open source security key to protect the digital lives of its users.