Smartphones become door keys for government

 

Abloy

Imagine your mobile phone was the key to your secure car park, office door, work computer and could also let you bypass the check-in queue at the hotel so you can go straight to your room.

That’s the vision from one of the world’s oldest locksmithing and smartcard companies which reckons it’s cracked the market in making smartphones into — quite literally — a turnkey solution for access control, digital identity and authentication.

If you’ve never heard of HID Global or its parent company Assa Abloy, they don’t mind. The chances are they’ve been letting you into your house or office for decades, and besides, locksmiths don’t really like talking all that much anyway.

If your office swipe card (it’s actually a smartcard) and the reader its zaps to aren’t made by HID, the technology is probably licensed from them. And if the metal front door cylinder lock to your home is a Lockwood, well, that’s them too.

Now, after at least two decades of making money by literally opening doors, the grandaddy of all locksmiths wants to make your smartphone into a key that fits its locks. And there are millions of them…that’s their locks. There are even more smartphones.

Given that public transport globally only in the last decade discovered smartcards as a queue busting technology (add eight years for Sydney) it’s not such a stupid idea.

The financial services and telecommunications industries have both jumped on the short-range or ‘near-field communications’ (NFC) smartcard bandwagon by trying to port payments via contactless chips increasingly embedded into phones (after a numbingly protracted dispute over who would clip the ticket on transactions).

It’s mostly publicity.

But if you put the politics of the payments industry (and there are plenty of them) to one side, the use cases for contactless keys on a smartphone almost scream out.

The first is that you can have electronic keys that open doors for a set period of time, or as needed; they’re disposable.

The second is that you don’t have to hand out physical keys or passes – and that’s a huge efficiency for any organisation with remote or mobile workers that need controlled access to premises or facilities.

Then there’s the comfort in knowing that you can delete keys as required allowing to literally ‘change the locks’ on people you want to keep out.

Steve Katanas is also not pretending the latest innovation is a major ‘new breakthrough’; locksmiths have always been a bit ambivalent about those too.

“The link between the physical and the logical has been around for a while,” Katanas says.

For government security managers, especially anyone dealing with contactors, the savings involved for being able to ‘credential’ a body without the morning queue for passes is a major saving.

“Part of the solution is convenience [especially ease of] use and revocation. Wherever those are important we are talking to customers,” Katanas says.

Government security sources Government News spoke to were certainly not dismissive of HID’s smartphone push, but pointed out there other products in the market. Even so, there was a general feeling that global locksmith’s latest toy was worth a serious look, especially if it made physical security and IT security talk to each other.

A common theme was that when it came to access control, it helped that a lock had been digitised as opposed to a digital product being locked.

As for bypassing the hotel check-in queue . . .well you don’t need to be a public servant or a politician to understand that.

Standby for the staff-free hotel.

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