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Los Alamos National Lab needed help to self-issue FIPS compliant, interoperable, secure local site access badges for 80% of their workforce.
The U.S. DOE subscribes to a government service for the issuance of FIPS compliant PIV cards for their employees. However, when it comes to their short-term employees, LANL needs to self-issue an interoperable, dual technology card to give them a local site access credential that meets the FIPS obligations for physical and logical access. Since they have to self-issue, Los Alamos would need to figure out and manage their own implementation and infrastructure for these secure credentials. What’s more, they had to be simultaneously compliant with the FIPS mandate and interoperable with all of their existing physical and logical access readers.
As a research and development laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Los Alamos National Lab is known for its contributions to national security. As such, LANL turned to HID® Global for cutting-edge local site access security and decided on the Crescendo Smart Card Series.
Los Alamos needed to implement an independent system that mimicked their government-issued service for secure credentials — meeting all the same high standards without the ease of government-issued access cards. To set up their own infrastructure, they would need:
Thankfully, HID had a recommendation on who they could call to help with such an undertaking, and the DOE Lab at North Las Vegas put in a good word as well. What’s more, LANL already knows the ID experts at K&A who have been supporting their PIV credential issuance since 2008.
K&A has been a trusted vendor with the Department of Energy at Los Alamos for PIV credential supplies since 2008, providing FIPS shielded badge holders, card printers, printer supplies, maintenance & support. K&A is proud to be trusted as their ID solutions provider, but this project came with another promising prospect: and the Lab at North Las Vegas (another laboratory within the DOE) recently worked with K&A to implement the same FIPS compliant credentialing system that Los Alamos National Lab now aimed for.
Once the particulars were workshopped, all that was left was managing logistics and getting 20k Crescendo Smart Cards in the hands of DOE short-term employees at LANL. With IT at Los Alamos, HID, and K&A all working together in weekly project management calls, this huge undertaking went from deciding on a card technology to implementing timelines within a few months.
Today, we at K&A are proud to call ourselves the secure credential custodians to Los Alamos National Lab’s Local Site Access badges. They own the encrypted keys; we are the gatekeepers to their security, and their trusted card printer support team.
And we at K&A stand by our slogan — “We do ID right.”
FIPS compliant local site access badges for the LANL workforce.
“We do ID right.” Our tagline says it all – we know what we are doing and are good at what we do.
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