U2F was developed by Yubico and Google, and contributed to the FIDO Alliance after it was successfully deployed for Google employees. The protocol is designed to act as a second factor to strengthen existing username/password-based login flows. It’s built on Yubico’s invention of a scalable public-key model in which a new key pair is generated for each service and an unlimited number of services can be supported, all while maintaining full separation between them to preserve privacy.