ALEXANDRIA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 28, 2006--Sagem Morpho is pleased to announce the July 17th approval of its fingerprint algorithms by the GSA FIPS201 Evaluation Program. These fingerprint algorithms are destined for use with the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) smart cards to be issued to all U.S. Federal Government employees and contractors under the HSPD 12 guidelines. Sagem Morpho's fingerprint algorithms will be used to create the ANSI 378 templates required during enrollment, for PIV card issuance and for cardholder verification. In addition to GSA approved fingerprint algorithms, Sagem Morpho offers a full set of PIV compliant biometric products, many of which are in process for GSA approval for PIV use.
"As this secure, interoperable smart card is implemented, it will become not only the Federal standard but also the Industry standard for facility security, information security and access to emergency disaster sites," commented James Conniff, Director of Access Control Solutions at Sagem Morpho. "Conscious of customer needs, Sagem Morpho stands ready to provide FIPS 201 compliant biometric Identity Management products capable of interfacing with the multitude of government management systems, as well as enterprise-level physical access and logical access control systems."
In 2005, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD 12) called for all U.S. Federal Government employees and contractors to be equipped with a secure and verifiable identification credential recognized by all government agencies. Criterion for this secure smart card credential was established by the NIST FIPS 201 standard. The PIV program is the implementation of this standard. The issued PIV card, containing fingerprint biometrics, encryption keys and tamper proof features will be used to gain access to Government facilities and information systems. GSA, through testing of components and software in concert with NIST, is approving vendor products for use in this program.
Interoperability of the PIV card issued at one Federal agency enabling validation and authentication by another is the cornerstone of this government-wide program. Interoperability performance testing conducted by NIST, known as MINEX04, documented the Sagem Morpho algorithms as the only algorithms to successfully perform both template generation and matching from high quality and more importantly, low quality fingerprint images. Additionally, Sagem Morpho's algorithms demonstrated the best performance speed. The test report, as well as a summary, is available on the MINEX04 web site at http://fingerprint.nist.gov/minex04/.
