Card, mobile credential, payment and security
As campuses switch to contactless smart cards for student IDs and move more applications to the chip are the mag stripe's days numbered? Greater security, increased convenience and reduced wear and tear on cards and readers are just a few of the reasons leading some campuses to make the switch to contactless technology.
In the next ten years the time will come when there’s no need for a card at all, says Nirmal Palliyaguru, director ACCESS and conferences at Santa Clara University in California. “The next time we re-card there won’t be a card,” he says. “It might be on your cell pone, we’ll have a docking station, and people will upload the card to their cell phone or PDA.”
Santa Clara is deploying Blackboard’s contactless smart card offering for a range of applications on campus. Blackboard partnered with Sony to bring the electronics industry giant’s FeliCa contactless technology to the U.S. market. FeliCa is widely deployed in Japan and other Asian countries with more than 350 million cards and readers used for payment, access and transit solutions, says Jeff Staples, vice president of marketing and business development at Blackboard.
Morehead State University in Kentucky also has fully embraced contactless technology with the help of its campus card vendor, the CBORD Group. Morehead’s new EagleCards include HID Global’s iCLASS contactless technology and enable access, payment and privilege control applications.
According to Mark Doi, director of education market strategies at HID, the drive for increased functionality is encouraging campuses to look at contactless. “We are seeing campuses migrate away from legacy technologies and upgrade their infrastructure over time (with contactless technology), because of the ability to add more applications beyond just opening the door.”
“The education market as a whole has embraced iCLASS as they see the value in comparison to older technologies such as proximity and mag stripe,” adds Doi. In Fall 2008, Doi told CR80News that more than 100 campuses were using or were in the process of migrating to iCLASS.
Clearly contactless has emerged as the premier technology of access control but as Santa Clara and Morehead are proving, it can also benefit other applications as well. Both universities are in the process of implementing the cards not only for physical access but for payments and more.
It had been ten years since Santa Clara had refreshed its campus card system, Palliyaguru says. The institution was in the process of getting rid of Social Security numbers associated with student IDs and started looking at different technologies that could better protect the information on the card.
In his travels around Southeast Asia, Palliyaguru saw the FeliCa technology in use and he remembered a presentation Blackboard had given on the technology during a NACCU Conference. “This is clearly the next generation and I thought this was the route for us to go,” he says.
Santa Clara is doing a slow rollout of the contactless cards on campus. Incoming freshman and first year law students received the cards first, Palliyaguru says. Anyone needing a replacement card is also receiving one.
Contactless readers from Blackboard are being deployed around campus and will be used at the various points-of sale, as well as vending, laundry and copier locations. The physical access readers are also being converted to accept contactless. The card still has a mag stripe, adds Palliyaguru, so it can be used where the new readers have not yet been deployed.
One of the biggest advantages of contactless on campus is its ability to facilitate transactions, Staples says. “For us the biggest difference is going to be in the high volume, high access areas like dining point-of-sales, door access and other areas,” he says. “We’re able to offer speed, security, and high performance readers that will ultimately impact customer satisfaction. We’re focused on the user experience and want it to be faster.”
It will likely be summer 2010 before the system is completely implemented at Santa Clara, Palliyaguru says. Eventually the campus will issue around 10,000 new cards. Administrators are taking it slow to make sure to troubleshoot any problems as they arise. “The technology hasn’t been used in this field before,” Palliyaguru says. “We don’t know what pitfalls we’ll find.”
While Santa Clara is taking time and care to deploy the new system, Palliyaguru is also focused on the future. He sees a wide range of other applications the card will enable, suggesting that they will “increase the touch points … ticketing, events, fundraising, anything can be done.”
Morehead State is moving all of its campus card applications to contactless with the help of system provider CBORD and HID Global’s iCLASS contactless technology. It also has a mag stripe that is used for banking functions and for some of the remaining doors that haven’t switched to contactless, says Doug Snedegar, Morehead’s EagleCard coordinator.
The iCLASS cards are being used with Morehead’s existing Odyssey PCS campus card system from CBORD. To date Morehead has issued 13,500 contactless cards to students and employees, Snedegar says.
The university is no stranger to smart card technology. Since 2001 the Morehead ID has used a contact smart card for beverage, snack, laundry and copiers purchases while the mag stripe was used for physical access.
Traditionally when an institution decides to switch to contactless, the first application on the list is physical access. Morehead took a different route rolling out payments first, Snedegar says. The university has 220 contactless readers deployed across campus, but only a handful of these are being used for physical access. The rest are used for dining services, snack/beverage vending, copying and printing and laundry payment.
George Washington University students have developed an easy method to allow faculty, staff, and students to donate to the relief fund in Haiti, all with the use of the campus ID cards.
Campus officials say faculty and students can simply swipe their GWorld campus cards, which are cash-linked, and help those who were affected by the series of devastating earthquakes that occurred on Jan. 12.
Five locations will be setup around campus to allow students to swipe their GWorld card, and enter the amount they wish to donate. 100% of the proceeds will be split evenly between the American Red Cross and Project Mediashare.
To read more click here.
Student Advantage LLC, a subsidiary of The CBORD Group, has just sweetened the deal for its traveling student cardholders by improving its already existent partnership with Greyhound Lines.
With the new improvements, it doesn’t matter if you’re heading back to school or traveling with friends on Spring Break, the student cardholders will now save 20% on Greyhound fares, as well as 40% on PackageXpress shipments.
This exclusive offer allows college students to conveniently purchase Greyhound tickets with Student Advantage discounts online and offline through a fully integrated marketing program. As part of the agreement, students can also purchase co-branded Greyhound Student Advantage Cards at hundreds of Greyhound locations, as well as through the company’s Web site.
With the money you save, you can buy that beanbag chair you’ve been wanting for your dorm room.
Regional Transit System and University of Florida’s RecSports employees are finding more and more non-UF students attempting to reap the benefits of a Gator 1 Card, reports The Independent Florida Alligator.
Attending UF students pay fees for free transportation and access to various fitness facilities by simply flashing their Gator 1 Card, so for non-students, a free bus ride or access to University facilities is as simple as borrowing or stealing someone else’s Gator 1 Card.
Non-students caught using fake or borrowed cards cannot be charged with using fake identification because the Gator 1 Card is not state-issued, said University Police Capt. Jeff Holcomb.
However, offenders can face penalties ranging from being kicked off the bus, being stripped of the card or being issued a trespassing warning. Students caught a second time face being arrested.
Holcomb said counterfeit cards were not used as much for getting football tickets or for campus activities such as GatorNights because the events require the cards to be scanned. People scanning IDs often overlook the pictures on cards; so borrowed cards are easier to pass off in these situations.
One semester, 22 instances of people using fake or borrowed ID cards were caught. Most of these occurrences were to gain access to sports complexes.
To read more on this click here.
A Muslim-American advocacy group recently sued Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences over a policy forbidding face coverings, according to The Daily of the University of Washington, which includes traditional Islamic headdresses.
The college said that the rule was created due to security concerns such as matching up a student’s face to their photo ID cards.
The complaint reads, “We believe this policy has a disproportionate impact on the religious rights of Muslim employees and is in violation … of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals because of their religion.”
According to the Boston Herald, a college spokesperson stated that the two Muslim students whom the rule may have affected did not object to the policy. However, those at the company that filed the complaint, the Council on American Islamic Relations, believe it could affect Muslims who may want to apply to the college or work around the school, though there are currently no workers to whom the rule might apply.
To find out more click here and here.
Following a burglary over the Christmas break, the State College of Florida is planning to improve security, reports Bradenton.com.
College President, Lars Hafner say two things to be included in the upgrade are surveillance cameras and changing conventional door locks to the issuing of ID badges.
While no student information was compromised in the burglary, the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office is still investigating the incident, which resulted in the theft of 41 new laptops stored in a campus warehouse, worth more than $37,000.
The College is already beginning to change its lock system from key locks to a card that will identify the person using it, says Hafner. “It will be looking at who can be held accountable,” Hafner said.
To read more click here.
The University of Alabama may undergo changes in the near future in how it handles football tickets for faculty and staff, according to the Tuscaloosa News.
The University of Alabama’s Intercollegiate Athletic Committee met to discuss its concern over employees who use their seniority to get tickets only to later scalp the entire season package.
The athletics committee is discussing making employee tickets similar to student tickets by placing them on a University ID card. The student system, implemented two years ago, has cut down substantially on scalping entire season packages.
The University of Alabama administrators are adamant about ensuring its employees are the only ones occupying the employee section. Concern initially rose a year ago, but due to lack of data and the limitations logistics involved with tracking ticket used the idea was never pursued.
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Larrian Daniels was arrested while attempting to enroll at Meridian Community College as a suspect in a gang related shooting that took place in El Paso, Texas, according to a news report from WTOK.com.
The 19-year-old was taken into custody by Campus Police while trying to obtain his student ID. Students beginning a new semester at the Mississippi community college are required to have a new photo ID made prior to enrollment.
Campus Police Chief, Shane Williams, was informed by the El Paso Police Department of Daniels’ intentions to attend the school. “Officials were telling us that they had news that they had possibly a suspect of theirs in a homicide that was possibly going to attend MCC. So they gave us a description of the person, his name and particulars and we told them we would be on the lookout. Later on that day that subject came to the police department to receive his ID and that’s when we took him into custody.”
Texas officials say Daniels and 20-year-old Phillip Berryman are being charged in the shooting death of Enrique Lewis after an argument Nov. 23.
“It is situations like this that make one thankful Mississippi schools have ID requirements” said student Brenton Johnson.
To read more click here.
Security challenges faced in enterprise-wide computer networks are likely to become a hallmark of 2010.
Organizations are moving to a Secure Network Fabric to respond and address the constant need for security and policy enforcement throughout the network, says Derek Wiggill, 3Com Africa regional sales director. “A network security solution needs to ensure that only legitimate network packets reach their appropriate destinations”.
A Secure Network Fabric is described as having real-time automated remediation, where threats are blocked and/or corrected in real-time within the network, identifying illegitimate packets and dropping them. Global enforcement should also be imposed everywhere in the network topology, rather than using chokepoints. Enforcement management must also be centralized, reducing inconsistencies and costs.
University and large campus networks are focusing on identity-based policies and user access management issues because they experience a large population of users, bringing their own unmanaged systems on to the internal network, and are not completely trusted. Assigning new users to groups, such as staff and administrators, or grouping students by major, can ensure appropriate access to various resources in a manageable fashion.
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A number of computers on Ohio University campus reportedly have unprotected sensitive student information, according to a report in the Columbus Dispatch.
Computers on the main campus were discovered during an audit containing students’ Social Security numbers that were not encrypted. This caused security teams to look further into the problem to determine if other computers around campus also stored unencrypted student data.
To prevent any future security risks, University President Roderick McDavis and his technology chief plan to centralize control over university computers. Over 200 servers will be taken control of – security specialists will then scan them to spot sensitive information that has not been properly protected.
During a separate check of computers on the university’s Zanesville campus, a team found Social Security numbers on at least computers that were vulnerable to theft.
Auditors stated that while they cannot confirm how much information was unprotected, they feel confident that no information was stolen or misused.
To read more click here.
