L-1 Identity Solutions, a provider of identity solutions and services, was awarded a contract by the Commonwealth of Kentucky to provide a secure driver’s license solution with facial recognition biometrics as part of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s effort to protect the public and prevent fraud.

The contract with L-1 includes a base three-year term valued at approximately $11.1 million and three additional two-year extension options that bring the total contract value to approximately $33.7 million.

The 2010 Secure POS Vendor Alliance (SPVA) Board of Directors welcomes their newly elected Chairman Bob Carr, chief executive officer at Heartland Payment Systems. SPVA , a non-profit organization working with multiple stakeholders to establish security solutions for card payment transactions and information, will have Carr serve as associate member director.

Carr’s contribution to developing a secure payments infrastructure is rooted in his experience at Heartland where he headed the development of end-to-end encryption technology, E3.

The Smart Card Alliance Health care Council will focus on educating the industry on the need for a solid, secure identity management infrastructure, its newly elected officers said.

“This has been an important year for the health care industry, with the federal government ready to invest over $19 billion in health care information technology as a result of the ARRA HITECH Act, and interest growing around the use of electronic medical records,” said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. “The Health care Council has made a lot of progress this year, raising awareness of the need for a strong identity management infrastructure that is a necessary foundation for using electronic medical records, and introducing smart cards as a secure technology for health care applications.”

atsec information security, a laboratory for the GSA FIPS 201 Evaluation Program which runs a product approval program for PIV-related products, has announced the successful GSA FIPS 201 evaluation of four Codebench products. Codebench is the first company with solutions evaluated for GSA product categories Caching Status Proxy, PIV Authentication System, and CHUID Authentication System.

Codebench’s PIVCheck Plus Desktop Edition with PIVCheck Certificate Manager, PIVCheck Plus Mobile Edition with PIVCheck Certificate Manager and PIVCheck Desktop Edition (both the SCVP Client and PIV Authentication System) were tested and evaluated in atsec’s Austin, Texas lab.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2010” aimed at improving cybersecurity research, development and technical standards.

The proposed law would create an office for a national coordinator for the networking and information technology research and development program. The law would also establish a program to develop and support identity management efforts.

by Zack Martin, Editor, AVISIAN Publications

The Biometric Consortium Conference is a good place to catch up on the latest developments and get some hands on experience with the latest technology.

Iris biometrics has always fascinated me. At my first Biometric Consortium Conference in 2002 I tested an iris camera that required me to be within an inch or so to get it to work properly. The technology has since come a long way and you can now authenticate from many feet away.

The UK is looking to new ways to combat underage drinking, smoking and violent crimes as recent survey reveals the futility of the Government Teenage ID scheme. A national study by Clarity Commerce surveyed 1,200 teenagers who admitted to not only using older friend’s ID cards to purchase alcohol, cigarettes and knives, but also to acquiring fake ID cards for themselves.

The UK Government efforts to deter teenagers from this behavior by implementing ID schemes have proven ineffective as teenagers find more ways to beat the system and fool shop keepers. Some 78% of over 18s admit to lending their ID to underage kids while 1 in 5 teenagers buy false IDs.

Hypercom Corp. announced that Carrefour, a global retailer, will deploy Hypercom’s Wynid server-based payment solution and more than 12,000 PIN Pads with EMV contactless readers at 210 of its French hypermarkets, as well as at all of Carrefour’s petrol stations in France.

The multi-million dollar agreement is believed to represent one of the world’s largest deployments of EMV contactless readers and represents an expansion to Hypercom’s existing business with Carrefour. The giant retailer already uses Hypercom’s Wynid secure payment solution at 15,000 cash registers in its Market, City and Contact stores.

Gemalto announced that it has acquired Finnish mobile authentication systems provider Valimo Wireless Oy. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Valimo’s technology enables mobile phone users to digitally sign documents and confirm legally binding transactions by entering a self-chosen passphrase or a PIN code. Valimo Mobile ID solution provides secure online banking, mobile payments, governmental services, electronic and mobile commerce and identity and access rights management for enterprise applications.

Unisys announced that its Mexican subsidiary has been awarded a contract by the Mexican Ministry of Internal Affairs and National Citizen Registry to create and manage an advanced citizen identification solution using biometric technologies. The project would create a database with iris, fingerprint and facial biometric data on up to 110 million Mexican citizens that would be used as part of the Mexican government’s larger national ID card project.

The contract, awarded to a consortium comprised of Unisys and Mexican communications company AXTEL, is worth approximately $50 million over three years, with approximately $32 million of the contract value expected to go to Unisys. Unisys will integrate the solution, provide the IT infrastructure and manage the data center hosting the solution. AXTEL will provide communications services as well as the data center facility and the service operations center.