Looks like convergence projects are in the limelight… lately I noticed a lot of interests on enabling the use of common credentials for securely accessing physical and logical resources.  Although we find most convergence projects are targeted at the enterprise level but there are serious minds working on using smartcard based PKI credentials for supporting citizen-scale projects (I regret that I cannot discuss the specifics) !  Ofcourse the use of on-card PKI credentials and its on-demand verification with the PKI service provider is in practice for a while now at security sensitive organizations. The DoD CAC, PIV and most smartcard based National ID/eIDs contain PKI certificate credentials and few of them includes Biometric samples of the card holder as well. Using those on-card identity credentials for accessing physical and logical resources becomes critical and also makes sense to  fulfil the ultimate purpose of issuing smartcard based credentials… it cannot be overstated.

Couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to present and demonstrate PIV card credentials based logical access control using Sun IDM, OpenSSO Enterprise, WinXP running on Sun Ray environment. The demo was hosted  one of the Big5 SI.  If you curious to see my preso detailing the pieces of the puzzle…here you go: