The December meeting of the influential Government Smart Card Interagency Advisory Board (IAB) was recently held in Washington D.C. FIPS201.com was on hand to cover the event and has provided, as a service to the IAB and the smart card community, an audio recording of the presentations. Click on the link below to access a list of audio and accompanying PowerPoint slides (in pdf format).

Visit FIPS201.com to hear the presentations and view the slides.  

Reportlinker.com expects the global smart card market to grow 12 percent through 2014, it says in a new forecast report, according to ATM Marketplace.

“Smart Card Market Forecast to 2014” is a global look at the shipment of smart cards. Reportlinker.com estimates that shipments will be around 6.1 billion units in 2011, an 11% increase over 2010. 

SAPO, Portugal’s largest Internet Service Provider and Web portal, has selected Yubico’s YubiKey two-factor authentication hardware to ensure login security for its employees and end users.

Internally, SAPO has deployed Yubico’s YubiKey hardware authentication token for two-factor access to its intranet. With it, SAPO employees can use unprotected equipment or networks to connect to internal web applications and data. 

Digital Certificate provider GlobalSign has launched an identity certificate product designed specifically for authentication of iOS devices.

The iOS Identity Certificates provide authentication services that give enterprises more control over mobile devices that attempt to access corporate business services and networks. 

PhoneFactor launched an app for smart phones and tablets that allow users to physically verify a transaction. The app pushes a notification to the user’s smart phone alerting the user a transaction is in process.

The user has to tap “Authenticate” or enter a PIN to verify account logins and transactions. The app is now available for iPhones and iPads, and will be available soon for Android devices. 

Numerous challenges to porting ID to handsets

U.S. government smart card officials want some way to either use the PIV on mobile devices or have the mobile itself be used as the credential. If there was one item missing from the first draft of FIPS 201-2 it was that, officials have bemoaned.

The computer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have listened and are trying to come up with a solution that would enable PIV on smart phones and tablets, says Bill MacGregor, a computer scientist at NIST working on the new FIPS 201 standard. MacGregor gave an update of the efforts to enable the PIV working on mobile devices at the Smart Card Alliance’s Smart Cards in Government conference in November and the December Interagency Advisory Board meeting. 

The Smart Cards in Government conference in November brought together a very good group of users, solution providers and trade associations’ members to engage on the state of the practice on trusted identities and the use of secure elements.

IDmachines contributed to a pre-conference workshop on PIV-I physical access control and an e-Gov overview for the Kantara Identity Summit. And despite budget challenges there remains work to be done with standards and programs such as the alphabet soup of acronyms: NSTIC, ICAM, OpenID, OAuth, PIV and PIV-I.

One set of acronyms that were described at the conference were PIV-I, PIV-C and CIV. To quickly go through how we got here … first there was PIV (FIPS 201) that begat PIV-I that due to cost begat PIV-C.