Cross Match unveils first HSPD-12 authentication application

When President Bush issued HSPD-12 in August 2004, he set off a technological gold rush of companies aching to get their hands on a massive slice of an identity verification pie estimated to be worth $22 billion worldwide over the next five years. We have reported on many of these endeavors, ranging from biometric solutions to enrollment services to the cards themselves. Noticibly absent, however, were any applications for authenticating the cards and reading the copious data they are mandated to contain. Yet without such applications, the cards would be nothing more than dandified versions of the pre-HSPD-12 flash passes. If nobody is going to scan the cards, what exactly is the point?

Things are changing. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based CoreStreet, already in thick of HSPD-12 infrastructure development, announced this week the availability of its PIVMAN credential authentication system. The PIVMAN software and hardware suite allows users to quickly check the authenticity of a card and confirm the card holder’s identity under any condition — even if the agency using the system is otherwise entirely off-line due to a disaster. This last is a critical point: while the cards themselves contain the whole of the user’s identity, the system’s handheld readers are constantly updated with dynamic information about his level of authority and area access permissions. If a disaster were to wipe out the agency’s IT infrastructure, all of the neccesary information dating back to the last server update would remain on the reader.

-read more at the company Web site