About Smart Cards : Industry Technical Contributions : OPACITY

Industry Technical Contributions: OPACITY

OPACITY is the Open Protocol for Access Control, Identification, and Ticketing with privacY.

OPACITY is designed to allow the removal of usage restrictions on contactless transactions. With OPACITY high performance security and privacy enhancements, the sensitive or privileged information can now be exchanged over the air with assurance.

The protocol strictly follows U.S. government and international standards. It has been assessed for compliance with the NIST standard for key establishment protocols (SP 800-56A). As a consequence, further protocol design reviews are unnecessary prior to FIPS 140-2 security certification.

OPACITY has been officially registered as an ISO/IEC 24727-6 authentication protocol.

OPACITY has been contributed to the Generic Identity Command Set (GICS) standardization initiative, currently an U.S. ANSI draft for specifying interoperable ID card interfaces.

As contributor to OPACITY, ActivIdentity has registered the protocol with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a Statutory Invention.

A reference implementation of OPACITY is accessible under an Apache 2.0 license at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opacity/

OPACITY Documentation

Please contact Eric Le Saint elesaint@actividentity.com for additional information on OPACITY.

Additional information about Smart Card Alliance policy for industry technical contributions can be found at: /smart-cards-contributions