Securing Your Facility?

krahd asks: "We, at the CS department of our University, in Uruguay, are evaluating different ways of securing the access to our floor. Until now we have used just a traditional door lock, but its's time to delpoy a new, more geeky solution. So, after reading this Ask Slashdot, I figured I'd pose this question as a follow-up. What would be the best way to do it? We've already evaluated biometric technologies like iris-scanning and fingerprint-scanning, and more traditional ways like intelligent cards but, what others possibilities exist, and which would you choose? Yes, price does matter."

Comments

biometric!!!

[m00by]

I'd say, go biometric. your thumb, or eye don't cost anything, and it should provide some good security. that, and it's way cool, and should work for a long time, unlike other things like smart cards which wear, and other card based solution.

Re:biometric!!!

[PerlGuru]

I had trouble with dns for that link but was able to find this one. Probably to the same ZDNet article about fooling biometric scanners with Jello.

Re:iButton

[deque_alpha]

We use iButtons on keychain fobs in my school district, and they work quite well, until someone loses a fob or we actually need to do an access audit. I don't know if this is typical of other ibutton based systems, but we have no central way to track / change access and the fob-locks require batteries which need to be replaced pretty regularly (every 6 months or so.
If someone loses a fob, then the lock person (luckily not me) has to go to every lock and remove that fob from the list of fobs that lock will recognize. We probably only have 14 fob-locks in the district, but it still is time consuming.
If you get an ibutton system (which seem like they would be good if they were properly implemented) make sure you can centrally manage it and that the locks don't use batteries as their primary power source.

Where I used to work

[Judg3]

We used a combo of Proximity/Smart cards and some biometric stuff.
All the workstations for the operations department used smart cards that also acted as proximity cards.
You'd plug in your card to the PC, enter a password, and you have access.
It also doubled as the proximity card, which we used for all the datacenters we had in the building, as well as for some of the cabinets.
For the critical NASDAQ stuff we had a seperate room with a mantrap, proximity card and hand scan. Once again all those cabinets in the room also used proximity cards.

This way, while most of us had access to the datacenters, we could only access the cabinets that we were supposed to. Network guys could only access cabinets that where needed by them, etc etc.

Worked pretty well, especially the combo smart card/proximity card. This way, you had to grab the card and take it with you when you went anywhere, which locked the workstation and prevented an inhouse people from tampering with anything.