Smart Card Alliance Identity Council White Paper Outlines Best Practices for Emergency Response Official Identification
U.S. emergency response officials (EROs) need to be able to identify themselves everyday and in an emergency. Events such as the September 11th attacks and Hurricane Katrina have shown that it is essential that these credentials be secure, electronically verifiable, and trusted across multiple jurisdictions. Smart card identity credentials based on Federal Information Processing Standard 201 (FIPS 201) meet these requirements, and take advantage of the enhanced ID infrastructure federal, state and commercial organizations have already put in place, the Smart Card Alliance Identity Council said in a white paper released today.
The white paper, Emergency Response Official Credentials: An Approach to Attain Trust in Credentials across Multiple Jurisdictions for Disaster Response and Recovery, identifies best practices and defines use cases for ERO credentials based on the FIPS 201 standard, and outlines how these credentials can meet identity goals of trust, privacy, interoperability, and usability. It also describes recent demonstrations and pilots of the First Responder Authentication Credential (FRAC) that have involved emergency response officials in the National Capital Region, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Colorado. The white paper is available to download on the Smart Card Alliance Web site.