Hspd12

During my Air Force days I was involved with the roll-out of the “CAC” for Air Mobility Command at MacDill. No one could understand why the military would put so much time and money into giving all personnel new ID Cards and equipping machines with readers that did nothing at that point. The main feature back then was that when you removed your CAC your machine would automatically lock. Well, that or you would just leave your CAC at work and need to call a coworker to come retrieve you from the gate. What I failed to understand back then was that Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) was something fundamentally needed for our nations and armed forces security. This should have been apparent and clear to me as I scattered around some of the bases most secure locations to find mission essential passwords affixed to stickies on the monitor. ...

For there record if you say "CAC Card" in my presence you will be "SOL Luck" talking again soon. If you are running Linux or Mac there is a good chance you haven’t been touching my CAC, otherwise known as Common Access Card. George Bush signed HSPD-12 way back in 2004 to mandate the usage of CAC and multifactor authentication on federal networks. The DoD giggled as it was already deploying limited installs at choice commands and was way ahead of the curve. The rest of the government and corporate entities are starting to roll-out the installs and a common theme I see is lack of heterogenous OS support. In this day and age your CIO/CTO/CISO must think beyond what the Microsoft sales lead tells them and think of the user base. Here is a big hint to save you from looking silly – You can’t say iOS/Android development is important to your divisions and then mandate they use Windows computers to comply with your SmartCard policy. I only mention that having sat in the room when the mobile development PM had to make his leadership aware they were basically shutting his group down. ...