A car door that isn’t fully shut.
A plastic grocery bag with a hole in it.
Giving a two-year-old a cup of liquid without a lid.
Leaving your laptop unattended at a coffee shop.
Jumping out of an airplane without checking that the parachute works.
Utilizing proximity cards at a facility.
What do all of these things have in common? They are not secure.
You wouldn’t drive down a highway at 70 mph with a car door that isn’t fully shut. Why? Because it’s not secure.
You probably wouldn’t give a two-year-old a cup of liquid without a lid to walk around with… why? Because it’s not secure. And that entire cup of liquid will be both on the floor and all over the two-year-old.
You get the point.
Similar to these day-to-day examples, facilities are still choosing to implement proximity cards even though the industry knows they are not secure.
So what makes them lack security?
It started in the 80s where a proximity card was hacked for the first time. Obviously that can be alarming to facility managers if their card system becomes vulnerable. And since then, things have spiraled to the point where there are actually commercially available tools that can replicate a proximity card in a matter of seconds. See image below.
If you’ve ever walked into a grocery store, a home renovation store, local convenience store, etc., you’ve probably seen a stand where you can copy keys. Oftentimes, employees will grab a copy of their card for their convenience, not realizing the downstream vulnerability they are causing to their employer’s facility. Not only does this pose a threat to the management of credentials for the security director at the facility, it also causes increased concern for a credential getting into the wrong hands.
People are continuing to adopt proximity cards as their credential option because they are either a) what they’ve always used b) the end user was sold proximity cards not knowing the vulnerability or c) they don’t know the appropriate migration path to get them away from proximity cards.
That’s where we come in.
While Wavelynx understands that proximity cards are still present in a majority of access control solutions installed today, our mission is to help provide an easy path to transition facilities away from proximity cards and to a more secure solution. Our multi-technology Ethos™️ readers are engineered to read proximity, smart and mobile credentials (NFC and BLE). So, that transition for a facility can be at their own pace and on their own time. We strive to make the transition as seamless and pain free as we can for our customers, which sometimes means laying out an entire transition strategy prior to implementation.
If you’d like to read more about the most common transition strategies we see, check out this article here. Interested in starting the conversation? Email me today at keely@wavelynxtech.com and together, we will get your facility to a more secure solution.