IDEMIA's paper rightly emphasizes that "converged identity systems streamline physical access, allowing employees to use a single credential...for both building entry and system logins." This vision is sound. The challenge lies in execution.
Today's access control landscape remains deeply fragmented. Organizations implementing security convergence face a maze of proprietary credential formats, each tied to specific vendors' ecosystems. An employee's biometric smart card, which works perfectly at Building A becomes useless at Building B if different manufacturers are involved. Digital credentials that authenticate seamlessly to one access control system require complete re-enrollment for another.
This fragmentation doesn't just create operational headaches—the reality of it fundamentally undermines the ideal security convergence goals IDEMIA articulates. When credentials can't move across systems, organizations face impossible choices: maintain multiple parallel credential systems (defeating the "single credential" promise), or undertake costly rip-and-replace migrations every time security needs evolve.
IDEMIA's paper discusses multiple credential technologies—FIDO2 security keys, mobile driver's licenses (mDLs), biometric smart cards, and digital credentials. Each represents sophisticated cryptographic and biometric capabilities. Yet without universal standards governing how these credentials are read, verified, and managed across diverse systems, convergence remains theoretical.
Consider the scenario IDEMIA presents: an employee uses their credential for building entry, system login, and secure account recovery. This only works seamlessly if:
This is where universal standards become essential infrastructure, not optional enhancement.
The LEAF Community exists precisely to solve this interoperability challenge. Our universal standard for access control credentials ensures that the security convergence vision—single credentials spanning physical and digital domains—can actually be implemented.
Our reality is that LEAF-compatible credentials work across any compliant reader, regardless of manufacturer.
This means:
For Security Convergence: Organizations can truly implement unified credential strategies, using the same high-assurance credential for facility access, network authentication, and secure recovery processes that IDEMIA describes.
For Technology Evolution: As IDEMIA notes, enterprises must prepare for "post-quantum computing" threats and "agentic AI" risks. Universal standards let organizations upgrade cryptographic algorithms or authentication methods without replacing their entire credential infrastructure.
For Risk Management: IDEMIA cites CISA's warnings about "hybrid attacks targeting both physical and cyber assets." When credentials are interoperable, security teams gain unified visibility across physical and digital access events—detecting anomalies that might indicate compromise across either domain.
For Vendor Resilience: The paper references the "$500 billion global cybersecurity market by 2030." In this expanding market, universal standards prevent any single vendor failure or business decision from compromising an organization's entire access control infrastructure.
We view IDEMIA's security convergence framework not as something to critique, but as something to strengthen. Their emphasis on high-assurance identity proofing, biometric authentication, and cryptographic credentials aligns perfectly with LEAF Community principles.
The technologies IDEMIA discusses—liveness detection, document authentication, FIDO passkeys, biometric verification—all become more powerful when built on interoperable foundations. A FIDO2 security key or biometric credential that works across any LEAF-compliant system delivers the seamless experience and robust security that convergence promises.
IDEMIA's implementation roadmap calls for enterprises to "assess their current state" and "identify gaps in identity access management, onboarding processes, physical access control, and account recovery processes." We'd add one more critical assessment: credential interoperability.
Organizations should ask:
Security convergence built on proprietary credentials may solve today's problems while creating tomorrow's constraints. Convergence built on universal standards creates lasting resilience.
The threats IDEMIA outlines—AI-driven phishing attacks up 135%, sophisticated social engineering costing billions, hybrid cyber-physical attacks—demand the unified security posture their paper advocates. We agree completely.
We simply believe that convergence is strongest when it's also interoperable. The same high-assurance credentials, biometric technologies, and cryptographic protections IDEMIA describes become transformative when they're built on standards that ensure interoperability, competition, and continuous innovation.
Organizations implementing security convergence deserve both the sophisticated credential technologies vendors like IDEMIA provide and the freedom to deploy those technologies across the devices they choose. Universal standards make both possible.
That's not just good security architecture. In an era of evolving threats and rapidly advancing technology, it's the only sustainable path forward.
Further Reading:
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