Making the leap from prox to contactless ID cards
Organizations struggling with the contactless conundrum
08 May, 2013
category: Contactless
Conundrum: Where does mobile, NFC fit in?
Just as contactless takes hold in the U.S, near field communication is coming quickly on its heels purporting to do away with the plastic card format all together.
Most agree that if this is to become reality, it is still many years away. It’s will be years before NFC becomes a standard feature, like Bluetooth, in handsets, says Paul Everett senior manager for the security team at IMS Research.
NFC has to find its way into the majority of devices for it to be a viable option. Even then there are some concerns with how one handset manufacturer may deploy the technology versus another, says Jason Hart, executive vice president for identity management and cloud solutions division at the Identive Group. There have been issues with some of the early NFC handset antennas and problems with data transmission.
There are also the ever-present issues with “bring your own device,” such as who owns the data on the handset and how can we manage the security issues when one device is used for both personal and corporate access, Hart says.
Enterprises that opt for contactless smart cards based on open standards, however, should be better prepared to make the transition from cards to handsets down the road as both technologies use the same family of ISO standards.
While widespread use of NFC for physical access is certainly a ways off, it hasn’t stopped vendors from creating applications, Hart says. Identive has a PIV applet that can mimic the same functions as the government credential and another that uses the PLAID contactless standard for mutual authentication of credentials and readers.