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GCN Home > 07/21/03 issue

Smart-card rollout might need more time

By Dawn S. Onley, GCN Staff

The Defense Department has until October to issue smart cards to 4 million users, but a senior official has recommended that DOD extend the deadline to early next year.

Currently, 2.5 million DOD users—active-duty military service members, civilian and contract workers, and some reservists—have the Common Access Card, a public-key encryption-enabled smart card for network authentication and digital signatures.

Betsy Appleby, project manager for the Public-Key Enablement Program at the Defense Information Systems Agency, said DOD would likely need more time to distribute the rest of the cards.

DOD’s plan for public-key infrastructure technologies will be spelled out later this month when Defense CIO John Stenbit meets with the department’s PKI program manager, R. Michael Green.

“The goal of the PKI program is to enhance the business processes and improve the information assurance posture of the DOD through widespread use of PKI-enabled applications,” said Jim Degenford, PKI program management office advocate. “PKI is not just a set of keys and a smart card. It’s a whole set of personnel [policies and] procedures to bind user names to electronic keys so that applications can provide desired security service.”

The Defense PKI Office is looking ahead to the next wave of PKI for securing e-mail, Degenford said. The office also plans to add biometrics to the smart cards.

The cards use the Java Card run-time environment on chips with 32K of RAM. The next generation of cards will carry 64K chips, Degenford said last month at a conference in Alexandria, Va., sponsored by Silanis Technology of St. Laurent, Quebec.

“Right now we have a baseline PKI. It’s functional,” he said.

The next version will have more functions and be more secure, Degenford said, although he declined to discuss the proposal of the next-generation card that Green will present to Stenbit. New Common Access Cards will be “more hardened, more robust—to provide more functionality for DOD PKI users,” he said.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, IT Security