Smart Card Update: GSC-IS v2.1 April 2004

While the private sector is in the very early stages of adopting smart cards for physical security applications, the federal government has been using and maturing the technology for over a decade. Most notable among the government’s smart card achievements is the Common Access Card (CAC) project being deployed throughout the Department of Defense.

The CAC is a multitechnology card that features contact and contactless microprocessor chips as well as bar codes and a magnetic stripe to bridge the DoD’s legacy systems. The CAC is the DoD’s primary physical and logical identification credential used to access facilities, computers, networks, and to complete electronic transactions. By March 2004, five years since the origin of the project, 4.5 million CACs will have been issued to DoD employees, military personal, and civilian contractors. A number of large military facilities are successfully using the CAC in conjunction with access control systems developed by AMAG Technology specifically for federal applications.

To ensure that the smart cards, like the CAC, issued by each federal agency are interoperable throughout the federal government, representatives from various agencies have developed an exhaustive set of standardized specifications. These specifications will guide the deployment and use of smart cards at every level of the federal government. The Interagency Advisory Board (IAB) is the government committee tasked with defining these specifications and overseeing federal smart card deployment.

The most recent and comprehensive specification, published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was published in July 2003. The 229-page specification, entitled “Government Smart Card Interoperability Specification (GSC-IS) v2.1”, details the rules and guidelines for the use of both contact and contactless smart card technologies. These rules and guidelines address the use of smart cards as identification credentials in physical access control applications. In September 2003, the Department of the Interior became the first federal agency to deploy a contactless smart card-based national access control system based on the GSC-IS v2.1 specification running on a Symmetry Enterprise access control system.

With these new specifications in place, numerous other federal agencies are looking for technology solutions that will enable them to deploy smart card-based access control systems that conform to the GSC-IS specification. One of these solutions, the AMAG S731 smart card reader, is the only physical access control card reader that supports both the contact and contactless specifications mandated in the GSC-IS document. In addition to other federal agencies, a few civilian contractors have also installed AMAG S731 readers in their facilities to begin making them interoperable with the GSC-IS-compliant smart card systems their federal customers are using.

Ken Francis
VP Sales and Marketing
AMAG Technology, Inc.