What is GOVPASS and how will it change the UK government sites?

In recent years, the UK government has been pushing to move towards a unified and highly secure access control system. As many government departments are moving towards the GOVPASS program, this will create a new government standard on access control systems and overall improve security across all 43 government departments.

What is GOVPASS?

GOVPASS is now the new UK government standard for card encryption for physical access control cards. This new standard allows a single card to be used across multiple departments, sites and applications. To clarify, this doesn't mean that cardholders have access to every government site. Or that the departments will all use the same access control system. It simply means that each UK government department will still manage the authorisations on their GOVPASS cards locally, meaning the cards used by each department will only allow access to their specific sites and applications. If someone needs access to another UK government location their card can be enrolled locally by the relevant department.

The objective of GOVPASS focuses on these 3 points:

Centralising Card Production: Ensuring consistency and quality across the board when it comes to ensuring security on all cards that are issued to personnel.

Local Authorization Management: Allowing all departments to manage authorisations locally while maintaining a standard of security

High-Level Encryption: Employing a robust encryption standard

In summary, GOVPASS creates a template for government cards, rather than an access-all-areas master card. It offers all the benefits of central production and control with the flexibility and security of local encoding and enrolment.

Why is GOVPASS being implemented?

Given numerous government estates and sites have been using various access control technologies and systems in previous years, without a standardised card format this would create a wide set of challenges around administering cards, supporting the various systems in place and dealing with end-of-life issues.

As mentioned, this would allow for cards to be produced centrally with a common set of applications and security features which overall ensures cards are made in the same way, to a strict standard. Given the rigorous testing with CPNI, GOVPASS can ensure an extremely high level of security for governments departments.

How GOVPASS will change UK government sites

GOVPASS will significantly improve security by enabling a complex, encrypted and swift way for cards to be read. As all cards will be produced the same, configuring which buildings and its rooms a specific worker can have access will be a much simpler task as compared to giving out an all areas master key. The implementation of GOVPASS will create new access control projects as government departments look to upgrade their systems or readers.

According to GOV.UK the GovPass project has rolled out about 85,000 cards across more than 50 buildings across several Government departments and agencies. While the target production volume would be 120,000 cards per year.

Tensor Access Control being used for GOVPASS

As government departments need to be enabled to use GOVPASS technology with their access control equipment, existing card readers need to be upgraded with firmware that is compliant with GOVPASS requirements.The GovPass technology is based around a MIFARE DESFire EV2 32Kb smart card.

Given that Tensor's Access Control smartcard readers support card formats including EM, HID 125KHZ Prox, HID iClass, MiFare, and DESFire. Government buildings should choose an Access Control system that can be specifically tailored to the building's needs, furthermore with seamless integration to CCTV, this allows for seamless monitoring of all access control activity and staff movements across your site.