Application

Access yes, contact no

Contactless smart cards have considerable potential in India, especially at airports and banks. They are expected to replace conventional smart cards and other access control devices, says Abhinav Singh.

Picture this. It is raining heavily and access to a company’s parking lot is controlled. An employee sitting in his car flashes his smart card from the vehicle, the reader located at the parking lot entrance reads the employee data information—and the gate opens.

This is just one example of how convenient life can be with contactless smart cards. There are many applications for them, and companies have begun using contactless smart cards for faster throughput, convenience and cost- effectiveness.

Deployment potential

Contactless smart cards are already being used by many organisations across the world. HID India, a company specialising in the field, has sold contactless cards to Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Reliance Infocomm, Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and the Ministry of Defence. Its international client list includes Phoenix Sky Harbour, AZ Manchester Airport, the New York Police Department, American Express and the Arizona State University. Corporates such as Sun Microsystems, HP and Microsoft are also planning to use contactless smart cards for securing network access.

Says Harish Vellat, Managing Director, HID India, “We are experiencing a 70 percent year-on-year growth in contactless smart card sales in the country. Indian airports could be a potential market if they opt for access control to different areas of the airport. We also expect Indian banks to adopt this technology.”

Inside the card

"Smart cards are an ideal complement to a biometrics implementation, and are particularly well-suited for multiple site installations " - Harish Vellat Managing Director HID India

A contactless smart card consists of a chip and antenna. There are two types of cards, passive and active. Passives do not have a battery, and if the card is taken into a Radio Frequency (RF) zone, the radio signals are picked up by the antenna on the card which passes the information to the reader located in the RF zone and vice-versa. The frequency depends on the size of the antenna on the card. Passive cards are used in situations where the distance between the reader and the card is not much.

On the other hand, active contactless smart cards have a battery inside them and can transmit information over a longer distance. Contactless smart cards are optimised for security by using cryptography, encryption and the internal computing power of the smart chip.

Smart card biometrics

A biometric application can be loaded onto a contactless smart card. For instance, if a person flashes a contactless smart card having biometric capability, the reader can read the biometric information on the card and validate the user. But to reconfirm, the user will again have to make physical contact with the reader to ensure that the process is completely tamperproof.

Comments Vellat: “Smart cards are an ideal complement to a biometrics implementation, and are particularly well-suited for multiple site installations. Storing the biometric template on the card simplifies system start-up and supports a large number of users. It also eliminates the wiring requirement for biometric template management, lowering implementation costs significantly.”

Such a convenience

A contactless smart card is a convenient solution for physical access control. With conventional smart cards, users must place the card in the correct position, and insert and leave it there until the end of the transaction before removal—something not necessary if you’re using their contactless counterparts. Contactless smart cards and readers are also more durable in harsh, outdoor environments, and contactless transactions are designed to be faster than regular ones. Conventional smart cards are not optimised for fast transactions but for high-security applications such as financial services and debit card PIN protection. Since contactless cards are aimed at high-throughput applications like transit-fare collection and ticketing, transacting quickly is mandatory while still maintaining high levels of security.

Form factors

Different technologies can be successfully combined on a single card. This facilitates the migration from one access control technology to another over an extended period, across multiple facilities, or for subsets of the entire card holder base. Another important aspect to physical access control is making the contactless smart card technology available in other form factors, notably keys and tags. (Tags are protected, self-adhering modules that can conveniently be added to an existing credential to simplify migration, or as a quick way to add new capabilities to a part of the total card population.) It is important to confirm whether your selected technology is available in these additional form factors of the physical access control market.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com