CAC-Secured Access to Lightweight Simulators through MOTAR with Netrist SmartBridge

The Department of Defense (DoD) wants to license best-of-breed software from the commercial marketplace. But software deployments to NIPR and SIPR require authentication with Common Access Cards (CACs). CAC authentication is not widely supported in commercial software, especially by innovative start-ups with amazing new technology build on tight budgets. The Air Force needs a way to make it easy for providers of commercial off-the-shelf software to meet CAC authentication regulations. The commercial market is awash in innovative AR/VR training experiences (including lightweight simulators), productivity enhancing AR applications, and Artificial Intelligence technologies. These blocks will build the next generation of training simulations that are both less expensive, more immersive, and more effective than their predecessors. The Air Force is engaging the market to use best-of-breed tools to better equip service members. To that end, the Air Force has white-labeled Dynepic’s DX Platform as MOTAR. This new platform will deliver best-of-breed training and simulator experiences. But if each vendor on the MOTAR platform had to modify its software to be CAC-compliant, the work of adopting CAC authentication would be repeated with every vendor, increasing the cost to the government, and increasing the barriers existing software companies have working with the Airforce. The CAC requirement could slow – or even prevent – the DoD from acquiring the best applications the market can offer.  By adopting Netrist SmartBridge on MOTAR, AR/VR and lightweight simulator vendors will be able to leverage CAC logins through the market-standard authentication APIs they are already support. MOTAR currently supports the market-standard OAuth2 protocol with OpenID Connect (OIDC) for single sign-on. This standard was developed by Google and others and is currently widely adopted by most major technology and identity providers (Google, Microsoft, Auth0, Okta, etc.).  Netrist SmartBridge sits behind the OAuth2 / OIDC APIs and enables CAC authentication following DoD standards. It facilitates interactions with the end user and prompts them to authenticate with their CAC without requiring the training vendor applications to be aware of the authentication method. SmartBridge will add CAC authentication to the single sign-on experience while interfacing through the OAuth2 /OIDC APIs.