Government ID, Smart Cards, Identification and Authentication

G&D unveils FIPS 201-compliant ID

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) will present its new StarSign cards at the RSA Conference in San Francisco next week. The card is the company’s first to conform to the FIPS 201 standards.

Another product that will be showcased is G&D’s StarSign Mobility Token, which provides secure mobile access to company data from any computer. The StarSign Mobility Token ID1 is a mobile, storage medium for data and applications that supports smart card-based authentication. G&D is also presenting joint solutions with partners such as ActivIdentity, Crealogix and Giritech.


StarSign FIPS 201 cards come in two different versions – an 80KB EEPROM and 144KB EEPROM. A variety of security features – from laser engraving and guilloches to other optical devices such as a holographic coating – protect the card body against counterfeiting. These smart cards have two communications interfaces – one for contact and one for contactless applications. Both reading mechanisms offer the same high level of security and provide strong authentication.

StarSign FIPS 201 cards are in G&D’s Sm@rtCafé Expert family, which consists of products based on the JavaCard operating system. [end] 

The General Services Administration (GSA) has implemented its first cloud-based physical access system at the Neal Smith Federal Building in Des Moines, Iowa.

The GSA contracted with BridgePoint Systems to utilize its TrustAlert Physical Access Control Systems. BridgePoint partnered with EmbarkIT to install the system, which replaced the GSA’s 10-year-old legacy system. The system leverages the GSA’s Kansas City, Missouri-based WAN and remote IT infrastructure, which allows the building to shrink its carbon footprint.

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This year Oberthur Technologies is on track to deliver more than two million smart cards to the U.S. government in 2011, making it the leading supplier of FIPS 201-compliant Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards for the fifth year running.

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Florida-based Codebench has released IDSync, a software development kit that enables automated provisioning and deprovisioning of users and credentials into a supported physical access control system.

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SecuGen announced that the General Services Administration added two of its fingerprint scanners to the FIPS 201 Evaluation Program Approved Products list.

The solutions, which are both compliant with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Personal Identity Verification FIPS 201 standard, are the Hamster IV v2 fingerprint reader and ID-USB SC/PIV v2 combined fingerprint and smart card reader.

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SecuGen has announced its Hamster IV v2 fingerprint reader, the new generation of its Hamster IV fingerprint readers, has met the requirements Personal Identity Verification (PIV) Single Finger Capture Device Specifications and received FBI certification for FIPS 201/PIV.

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The Ralph Carr Judicial Center in Denver, Colorado has selected AMAG Technology’s Symmetry Homeland V7 Security Management System,to provide integrated access control and security management solutions from HID Global.

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