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| Smarticware Services/Offerings |
| Chip Based Employee cards for Governments and Corporations |
Many companies and organisations issue visual ID cards for their employees which the employees have to carry when they are on the company's/organisation's premises. Such employee cards are also in some cases used to access the physical premises of the company/organisation. However, when accessing the company's/organisation's IT systems totally different IDs are used. Today the most common way is to use a simple userID with a password when logging in to the IT system. For remote access from home or from portable PCs stronger ID techniques are used e.g one time password generators.
Because of the higher security requirements in the society in general, mainly caused by the 11 Sept 2001 terror attack, some companies/organizations have introduced or are planning to introduce better and higher security for entering the premises of the companies/organizations. There are also strong requirements to increase the security for accessing the IT systems and to enable the employees to encrypt email and to electronically sign documents and data. The means to do this is via PKI based identities often stored on smart cards.
The US government has taken the lead in this area with the Department of Defense (DoD) in the forefront. DoD has over the passed 4 years issued millions of smart ID cards (Common Access Card) to its employees and DoD contractors. These new employee cards are used for accessing premises and for accessing the IT systems as well as for protecting digital information in computers and when sending such information. Biometric data are included on the more advanced cards to get a good control of the people entering the premises.
US National Institute for Standards (NIST) has collected information from the many smart card pilots in the US and defined a draft for an American standard for employee cards (GSC-IS). That standard has then been improved (FIPS 201) and this new draft is under discussion. It is expected that there will be an approved draft US employee ID card standard by 27 Feb 2005. NIST wants the American standard to form the basis for a new international employee ID card standard.
In summary, it looks very promising that a global employee ID card standard will be established in the coming years. That would make it much cheaper and easier to implement advanced smart card based solutions for entering premises and IT systems of a company/organization.
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