Beyond Traditional Boundaries: Modernizing PIV/CAC Authentication

While the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) and Common Access Card (CAC) represent a high assurance, technically interoperable, and a highly regulated method of authentication, they suffer from factors such as ease of use, ability to work with mobile devices and across devices. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memorandum M-19-17, Enabling Mission Delivery Through Improved Identity, Credential, and Access Management, opened the door for federal agencies to consider “additional solutions that meet the intent of HSPD-12” beyond the mandated credentials such as the PIV and CAC.” As a modern approach for phishing-resistant authentication, FIDO2 has the benefits of ease of use, support on a variety of operating systems (OS), web and mobile platforms, ability to sync across devices and to support cross-platform authentication.

In this webinar, panelists will describe their agency’s progress and challenges in leveraging PIV/CAC and the PKI credentials embedded within as the primary identity authentication mechanism for federal enterprise users. They will discuss the trend of agencies implementing additional (often weaker) authentication techniques to support a variety of use cases that PIV/CAC do not readily support. They will also discuss their agency vision with respect to leveraging FIDO2 credentials, and specifically, Derived FIDO2 Credentials to address multiple authentication use cases and the benefits and challenges of such implementations.