Features Business & Marketing
Identity credential provisioning: Adding a mobile model

The latest, traditional badge-printing solutions offer many benefits, and now include high-duty-cycle options optimized for capacity, high extended-run throughput, ruggedness and security. Alternatively, many companies and their integrators opt to work with an outside service partner. Badging providers like HID Global offer a comprehensive blend of expertise, card technologies, visual security elements, personalization and high-volume delivery capabilities.

Physical credentials aren’t the only option, though. In the past year, it has become possible for users to carry digitized versions of ID cards and keys inside smartphones and other mobile devices. Digital keys are created using a new, standards-based and technology-independent data structure, and are “presented” to a reader using short-range Near Field Communications (NFC) wireless communication technology.

One example of this data structure is HID Global’s Secure Identity Object (SIO). SIO-based credentials inside a smartphone interact with interpreters on the reader side to perform functions similar to those of traditional cards and readers. All SIO operations between phone and reader occur within HID Global’s Trusted Identity Platform (TIP) framework. Within this boundary, organizations, can now issue SIO-based credentials to mobile devices over the air, using a cloud-based provisioning model. This mobile model is also more secure. It enables credential issuers to monitor and modify security parameters when needed, eliminate the risk of credential copying, issue temporary credentials as needed, and cancel credentials when devices are lost or stolen.

Debra Spitler is vice-president of Mobile Access Solutions with HID Global.