The 4 Bridges Forum announced the recipients of the 2012 awards for innovative uses of high-assurance digital identities utilizing public key infrastructure in the public and private sectors.

One winner for each of four categories was selected from submitted nominations. A grand winner also was picked from the winning nominations. The grand winner will be announced and all awards will be presented at noon, Nov. 28, during a session of the Smart Card Alliance’s 11th Annual Government Conference at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (Room 145) in Washington, D.C.

Category winners follow:

• Innovation – Monitor Dynamics for its Trusted FICAM Platform, a high-assurance physical access control system delivering trust by leveraging PKI-based identity credentials, across the PKI Bridge trust infrastructure in a unified approach to physical access control.

• Business value – John Hannan of the U.S. Government Printing Office for leading the agency’s drive to enable fully electronic submissions to the Federal Register. Utilizing GPO’s PKI-enabled electronic document submission system, agencies submitting documents for publication convert documents to PDF format, digitally sign them and submit to the Federal Register via email, thus eliminating daily delivery fees, among other benefits.

• Federation – The Defense Manpower Data Center for the transition of the Joint Personnel Adjudication System from username/password to acceptance of all Department of Defense approved external PKI credentials of medium hardware or equivalent assurance.

• Collaboration – National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program for its use of PKI-based interoperable digital identities enabling government and industry cancer researchers to accelerate the start-up phase of clinical trials by securely accessing, reviewing, signing and exchanging cloud-based documents. In addition to speeding the process, the use of digital identities dramatically reduced costs.

CILogon project at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Professor Sean Smith and his PKI Lab at Dartmouth also received honorable mentions.

The 4BF Award Selection Committee was made up of a representative from each of the four participating bridges – the Federal PKI Policy Authority, SAFE-BioPharma, CertiPath and the Research and Education Bridge Certification Authority.