Page 82 - Security Today, January/February 2019

coverstory
Walking around college campuses and universities it is common- place to see students walking to and from classes, studying in the library, and now playing Fortnite in the student center with their free time. What you don’t see anymore—which used to be commonplace—are students uti- lizing a magnetic stripe or barcode to access their dorm, buy food, or check out books from the library.
Many schools have discovered that using these technologies, especially for door access, are fraught with security vulnerabili- ties and expensive to maintain over time. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find these types “dumb” ID badges that are personal- ized with only a color photo, black text, mag stripe or barcode that function simply to help others visually verify that we are who we
"For many years, the technology to read or write the data from these contactless smart cards wasn’t readily available"
say we are. No longer a novelty, contactless smart cards are now a large part of daily life on campus for many of colleges and universi- ties. Today’s smart IDs serve not only as photo identification, but also as access cards, debit cards and even mass transit passes in
major cities across the world.
While the cards themselves have become
smarter often times the process to issue these contactless smart cards has become more complex and challenging for campus card offices. This is in large part due to the make- up of the smart card, which although they very much resemble the cards of old in size and shape, are quite different on the inside. Smart cards have an embedded chip which has memory to store data, such as a card num- ber for door access, and also has an antenna allowing the card to be read using an RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) reader.
These chips allow for additional security as the card data is encrypted and typically requires authentication to read the data from the card. As a result, the process to issue or enroll these contactless smart cards into the credential management solution is
18 campuslifesecurity.com | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019