The HSPD-12 initiative passed its four-year deadline on October 27 while attendees at the recent Smart Card Alliance Smart Cards in Government Conference listened to an official with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) report on the government-wide credentialing program’s impressive results.

Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and IT with the OMB, called the initiative a “successful partnership between government and industry.” In the past four years, standards were created and implemented; identity vetting and issuance processes are in place; 34 system integrators and 370 products were qualified; and agencies planned to implement both physical and logical access control using the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards.

As of September 1, more than 1.2 million credentials had been issued to federal government employees who were fully vetted by the new process.

State and local governments are now starting to plan, test and use PIV interoperable cards, and enterprises are also moving to adopt PIV interoperable or compliant cards. PIV compatible cards issued by commercial enterprises would meet the FIPS-201 technical specifications but have digital certificates that are not cross-linked and therefore not interoperable with the federal government.

The Smart Card Alliance Identity Council recently published a white paper, Using FIPS 201 and the PIV Card for the Corporate Enterprise, available for free at the “Identity Council” page on the Smart Card Alliance Web site.

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