About the business
I manage a shared office floor of about forty people. We've used plastic door cards for years, and I'd honestly never thought about what was inside them.
The problem
Our new IT colleague asked a simple question. "What type of card is this?"
I had no answer.
So I read up. Old 125 kHz proximity cards send a fixed ID with no cryptography, so cheap hardware can copy them. Some MIFARE Classic-type cards are broken too. Nothing had happened to us. I just couldn't say which group we were in.
That bothered me.
What we did
With our integrator, we asked four questions, door by door:
- What chip is in the card?
- What formats does the reader accept?
- How does the reader talk to the controller? Wiegand is plain text; OSDP is stronger if it's set up right.
- Who holds the keys?
The server room, finance room and main entrance moved to encrypted cards. The kitchen corridor stayed on cheaper ones.
The result
I can now say which card protects which door. High-risk doors no longer depend on cards that cheap hardware can copy, and we didn't have to change every door to get there.
The reader wiring turned out to matter as much as the card. Here's what one finance office checked before handover.
Don't know what chip is in your door cards? Tell us what you use. We'll help you list card, reader, wiring and keys door by door, and say which doors to upgrade first.
Free door-by-door access review
Send us your door list, or just tell us what's behind each door. We'll reply with the weak spots and what to fix first, cheapest first.
- Free
- Reply within 24 hours
- No obligation