Entrust Credentialing Services Offers New End-to-End, SAAS Approach For Identity-Based Smartcards

DALLAS, June 15. Building on its heritage of providing identity-based security credentials for government, enterprise and border security initiatives, Entrust, Inc., is extending their public key infrastructure technology to provide a comprehensive multipurpose smartcard offering. The Entrust Credentialing Service is an end-to-end hosted solution for organizations to issue unified smartcard credentials -- tailored for enterprise, citizen or government environments -- to secure physical and logical access, virtual private networks (VPN) and other enterprise functions and capabilities.

"Whether for employees, citizens or government officials and agents, organizations will no longer be forced to consolidate interoperable technologies on their premises to deploy proper identity-based smartcards," said Entrust President and CEO Bill Conner. "From identity vetting to issuance, Entrust is a single source to help organizations implement a proven, cost-effective credentialing solution -- regardless of environment or scope."

Based on Entrust Managed Services PKI, Entrust's credentialing service includes all necessary components including identity vetting, data capture, personalization, printing, issuance and revocation. The credential facilitates mobility, interoperability and security of end-user access by employing one credential for building access, computer/logical access and a wide range of useful applications, including secure e-mail, document-signing and more.

In advanced deployments, the multipurpose smartcards can also include the electronic machine-readable travel document (eMRTD) data identical to an ePassport. This capability helps extend the value of the service, particularly for law enforcement organizations and government departments. Entrust's multipurpose smartcards that include eMRTD credentials are compliant with all ICAO standards, including Basic Access Control (BAC) and Extended Access Control (EAC).

As a hosted service, Entrust credentials can even be scaled to take advantage of future biometric standards, including fingerprints, retina scans or facial recognition -- all on the same smartcard.An additional layer of security can be implemented for organizations that require strong authentication for user access to VPNs or sensitive applications. Entrust's patented grid authenticator can be seamlessly embedded on the reverse side of the smartcard. The easy-to-use grid consists of numbers and characters in a row-column format. Upon login, users are presented with a coordinate challenge and must respond with the information in the corresponding cells from the unique grid tied to their identity.

Entrust Managed Services PKI allows organizations to establish and maintain a trustworthy environment by providing certificates that secure many off-the-shelf applications using encryption, digital signatures and strong certificate authentication. This enables organizations to control access to resources, prevent theft of information, and comply with privacy and digital signature regulations.

Approximately 1,000 government and commercial organizations have purchased Entrust PKI solutions since Entrust brought the first PKI to market in the 1990s. Entrust also offers a convenient hosted PKI service that helps reduce upfront investment, or the need for in-house experts and secure facilities.