Saturday, December 25, 2004
Walking the Dog
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Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Security through Viral Propogation
Ever wondered how costly the electronic card readers on your office doors are? Economist (Dec 4, 04) Technology Quarterly has an article that points out that installing these card readers and wiring them to a central database (to authenticate employees, for example) can cost between $3,000 to $5,000, 80% of which goes in network wiring. Thats why, even in the most secure settings, at most 3% of the locks tend to be connected.
CoreStreet, a Cambridge (Mass) based software company is taking the approach where card themselves are the networks. There is still one central access list that says who is allowed to open what, and it is regularly sent out to the 3% of locks that are connected. The cunning part is how the list is propagated to other, unconnected locks: by the users themselves. Whenever an employee swipes his card through a connected lock, the list is copied, in encrypted form, on to the card. As he then walks through unconnected doors, the card transfers the latest copy of the list on to their locks, replacing their older versions. These locks in turn pass the new list on to any other cards passing through, and so on.
The new “intelligent” locks from Assa Abloy and CoreStreet that do all this cost about $1,000 each.
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