NIST's Personal identity verification program (NPIVP)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has established the NIST Personal Identity Verification Program (NPIVP) to validate Personal Identity Verification (PIV) components required by Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 201.

The objectives of the NPIVP program are:

• to validate the compliance/conformance of two PIV components --PIV middleware and PIV card application with the specifications in NIST SP 800-73 and
• to provides the assurance that the set of PIV middleware and PIV card applications that have been validated by NPIVP are interoperable.

All of the tests under NPIVP are handled by third-party test facilities that are accredited under the Cryptographic and Security Testing (CST) Laboratory Accreditation Program (LAP) established by the National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program (NVLAP) and have extended their scope of accredition under CST LAP to include the PIV Test Methods.

Vendors interested in PIV card application and/or PIV middleware validation testing may select any of NPIVP Test Facilities.