Treasury set to issue digital certificates with smart cards

The Treasury Department plans to issue digital-certificate-embedded smart cards to 7,000 Treasury employees across the country beginning next month, said Bernadette Curry, Treasury's PKI program manager.Treasury became one of the first four agencies to join the Federal Bridge Certification Authority at the end of last month. Its certificates became interoperable with those of NASA, the National Finance Center and the Defense Department."This is a huge deal," Curry said about the cross-certification, because it sets things up for other projects. "We started to issue certificates in the latter part of March of this year," she said.Only 90 Treasury employees have digital certificates now. Curry said the department decided to wait for its smart-card deployment to issue its certificates."We don’t have that many people using certificates because we are waiting to issue certificates on smart cards," she said.